Vina Escaped
by Richard T. Green
Summary: Star Trek's first mysterious beauty returns, as the Federation is quickly being dismantled by hatred and violence- and James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock return to find a strangely deserted Talos IV.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note

Once again, I have to apologize: this book has not been professionally edited; and there will almost certainly be some sentence(s) I only partially changed, in my haste, in various stages of re-write.

Also, I would be very surprised if some talented person has not already tried to rescue Vina from her cage on Talos IV, where she dreamed with Captain Pike, at last official word. I apologize for splashing around in your pool, if you've also been working on this legend. And, I hope you can still enjoy this book on its own, whether I'm the first, or the third, or the tenth author to come to the aid of the beautiful castaway. In some ways, hers is the most romantic (and bizarre) of all _Star Trek_ stories…

"_**Star Trek's first mysterious beauty returns; just as the Federation is wracked by irrational hatreds and violence—leading Kirk and Spock back to a strangely abandoned Talos IV..."**_

"**VINA ESCAPED"**

_by_

_Richard T. Green_

**PROLOGUE **

It was certainly a beautiful day for shopping, and Jessie Landon bundled along with the crowd, down a sidewalk in Rigel II's busiest city, carrying at least six shopping bags, along with an immense feeling of satisfaction. Only two of the bags were _really_ huge, and though she'd have some explaining to do when she got back home, she felt sure her husband, a dust-back dilithium miner, would have to agree she'd made some very cagey purchases on a weekend spree, all by her lonesome.

The spires of the city reached up all around into the glowing blue sky and, above that, sky-cars soared in great silent grids, occasionally interrupted by a tic-tac-toe line of a larger craft, still higher above, heading off to the still greater Rigel III. It was a far cry from where she usually called home. She simply couldn't imagine a more horrible place to have to strike it rich than Tarsus X. Why was all that precious dilithium always in the hardest place to find, these days? But, strike it rich they had and, in another year or so, Bob would retire and they could spend all their time shopping or relaxing or…

Something caught her eye: a very smart, silky dress in a huge shop window, as robotic mannequins half-swooned like ballet dancers in expensive designer gowns. Jessie stood there, on her way back to the hotel, where she would put in a sub-space call to her sweetie, a week away at warp eight.

What a gown, what a color, what a swooping set of untied-ties coming down off the shoulders, and curling just above the floor, like the ribbons of Fate: starting up around those slender, robotic arms, and unspooling forever like the most elegant of creped streamers. It even had a little round veil to match, brushing against the forehead…

Jessie put one foot out toward the shop entrance, drawn in by the thrill of the kill, as she made up her mind to try for one more find. Then her other foot swung forward with perfect confidence, as busy Rigilians swarmed around her on all sides, in their smart big-city suits and going-to-market clothes.

And her toe bumped into something soft.

"Oh, my," she said, without quite registering the disastrous sight at her feet, nor the fact that she was suddenly standing in what appeared to be a glistening pool of orange blood, around her dressy white shoes. She could swear the sticky orange mess wasn't there a moment ago… And then her temples started to pound, and her forehead felt like ice, and she let out a little scream, right before she fainted dead away: collapsing onto all those shopping bags in a heap.

Now the robotic models in the window seemed to be writhing in mourning: as if they, too, might collapse: slowly and elegantly beseeching the Heavens for some kind of justice or reasoning to explain—not only Mrs. Landon, lying there unconscious, on her all her shopping bags—but the outrageously mutilated body at her feet, with its long silvery robe and huge cranium, as big as a pregnant belly. It also seemed that half the monstrous brain was chopped to bits from knife-wounds above its wizened little face. Its staring eyes seemed wise and hard, even in the absolute stillness of death. Its blood was still spreading, and poor Jessie was the only one close enough to touch the body. Everyone else, who'd stopped so suddenly in amazement, was keeping a half-meter or so's safe-distance. After a long, long moment, Jessie's eyes began to flutter, and she began to stir again.

But the crowd quickly grew, and pictures were snapped, and police were summoned, and their individual murmurs became like a feverish whispered din: all focused into the center of that quiet, polite mob. Everyone had to agree they'd never seen an alien quite like that one before, and wasn't it terrible, and what about that wealthy middle-aged lady lying there next to it, and should they even try to touch her, or it, or either one, themselves?

But what they didn't know; what almost no one knew, was that the United Federation of Planets had gone to very great lengths to make sure that no one had _ever_ heard of Talos IV, or the humanoids they'd found there, and so thoroughly cordoned-off. Only a select handful of officers could have told the story, and they'd been sworn to secrecy years ago, on board a single starship, the USS _Enterprise_.

But now, all that careful planning was out the window, just like that.

**Chapter One**

By chance or luck, four great starships lay moored a few days later, at Starbase XI: their saucers and long warp engines lined-up like shields and swords after battle. It wasn't proper security: at least two of them could have been diverted another three weeks out of the way, for safety reasons; but one (the _Enterprise_)would only be there a short time, and the others would soon depart as well.

From his own bridge, James T. Kirk could see the muscular shadows of the _Farragut_, and also the newer _Constellation _and _Intrepid_ lined-up magnificently across the vast grid-work that surrounded the base itself. It had been nearly two years since their two warp-drive namesakes were lost. But, as if to deny the power of their destroyers, Starfleet decreed the greatest fleet in the galaxy would not be broken, 'by name or nemesis.' In fact, there were fourteen starships in the line, at the moment, including the originals. But that number tended to fluctuate.

Captain Kirk's own ship had only just arrived and, with the usual sense of the absurd, would soon be off again, without much chance for crews to mingle, after some minor business had been settled with an unnamed Admiral on base.

Was it him, or did the usual efficiency on the bridge around him, the men in smart black trousers, the women in impossibly short skirts, seem clipped or even silently offended in their bearing, as they came and went from the turbolift behind him, or monitored distant voices below decks. It seemed clear that each knew they'd be off along the far frontier before they'd ever had a chance to greet their fellow officers for a smile, or a laugh, or some fanciful hope of a chance encounter.

He signed another report on another wedge-pad, another requisition for another batch of flour and rice and beans and well, to be honest, he didn't read through a list of stores that four other officers had signed-off on already. And another beautiful young woman nodded and took the wedge-pad and stylus, barely looking into his smiling, hazel eyes before going back to the turbolift. She pointedly did _not _stopto regard the lonely human outpost out in space, on the viewscreen, that floated on an imaginary tactical spoke somewhere between Earth and the Neutral Zone, a base suddenly made garish by those four grand starships hanging from her invisible tethers, in the middle of nowhere.

_Sorry_, was all he could imagine himself saying, as he watched this latest yeoman leave the bridge, turning her back on the starry view of the floating Ferris wheel of the base, where the crews of other ships would already be gathering and getting together and planning dances like characters in a Jane Austen novel, or something more modern. The turbolift doors snapped shut behind her. It almost seemed like his own crew was mad at him: that he couldn't wrangle a few days, or even a few hours' adventure for them with their own kind, before heading back to the depths once more.

"Starbase signals Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock, report at once," Lieutenant Uhura, the most beautiful of all the women on board, announced in her coolest and most efficient tone, from over his right shoulder, in her crimson skirt: also not allowing herself to regard the main viewscreen. Everyone wants off the boat, Kirk mused, when they aren't darkly summoned by some unidentified admiral…

"Come on, Spock," he muttered, not knowing which would be worse: facing a top-level bureaucrat, living in a parallel universe of treaties and tactics; or facing his own men, once the ship had finished its all-too-brief stop. The Vulcan, with his longer legs, was right along-side of him from the science console and into the lift, the two marching almost as one.

"Transporter room," Kirk said, either to his first officer, or to the quietly omnipresent ship's computer, and the small elevator scooted down, and then one way, and then another through the vessel, till they stepped out into a curving corridor.

When they reached the transporter, the usual complex humming filled the air, reassuring him that, in a few moments, he'd be standing in the base itself: his atoms spun into light and then shot across the freezing vacuum. He smiled to Scotty, at the big control panel a safe distance away.

"Ye'll be going through a couple of beaming cycles before ye actually get there, Captain," Mr. Scott said, looking bemused or even worried, as the two commanding officers stepped on to the thick quartz-like pads, and stood at attention.

"You know as much about it as I do, Scotty," Jim Kirk said, and gave a little nod. He and the stalwart Vulcan were seemingly devoured by golden shimmering locusts: first in their bellies, and then their heads and arms and legs; and then they were gone. The transporter's buzzing rose to a peak and fell off, till the steady hum of the machinery resumed its hypnotic regularity.

"Aye, it's like a shell game," Scotty said, standing alone, shaking his head and looking down at the big control scanner, knowing Starfleet was up to something. He could see from the instruments that his two superior officers were already materializing in another, activated chamber, all ready to be beame to some unknown, third location, beyond his detection.

The captain thought he could see, or sense, another Spartan, military-type transporter chamber fleetingly, around him. He knew his boots and feet and ankles had almost come to rest on another glassy lens, somewhere else. And then, it happened again, a faint weightlessness, and then the sensation of gravity again, as that next, second or third, mysterious chamber vanished like a flicker of a dream. But as they finally seemed to have arrived in an utterly blackened room, he also knew he and his first officer might just as well be dead and stuck in Limbo.

He thought he could hear Spock shifting his weight, at arm's distance to his right, so he assumed they were wherever Starfleet wanted them to be. At least, for the moment. But the lights gradually came on around them, and an unsmiling lieutenant led them out.

They were silently ushered through a long succession of corridors and doorways and even trams and station stops and across hallway intersections, where guards were holding back the usual Starbase personnel, and Kirk and Spock (and their dour escort) rode alone through tunnels and above station mezzanines. It seemed they traced their way from one end of the Starbase to the other. And all the while, the number of technicians roaming the halls or chatting in hatches grew smaller and smaller as they went around one corner after another, till it seemed they'd run out of all other life forms entirely. But it was clear that someone could have given someone some better coordinates, to save time and boot-leather, if there'd been any real planning before-hand. The sheer waste of time began to wear on him, though his Vulcan friend seemed unperturbed. What were they pursuing? Or perhaps, what were they running away from, in such secrecy?

Finally, they stepped through some odd black doors into another darkened room, like the one they'd finally materialized in nearly twenty minutes earlier and, by that time, Kirk was thoroughly exasperated. It was not much different from a cadet's nightmare, where you search and search, but never find the right Academy classroom, hurrying up and down every hall and passageway, until you've searched the entire year away, only to stumble in, and be swept into a final exam you couldn't possibly pass.

"Ah, hello, gentlemen," a rich, British, or perhaps Lunar-sounding voice said, from somewhere up above. A moment's visual searching finally allowed Kirk to pinpoint a ruddy, square-faced man, slowly descending toward them in this very poorly lit room… or hanger. From the sound of his boots, it seemed he was quietly clanging down a metal staircase, and the sound echoed into unseen corners.

"Admiral," Kirk nodded, and in a moment he recognized the bulldog jowls of the head of Starfleet Intelligence. "Admiral McCrae," he said, introducing him to Mr. Spock.

"Forgive me, gentleman," McCrae shrugged, as if forgiveness would be automatic, "Starfleet insists my own coordinates remain unlisted," he smiled, as if it was a rather idiotic little joke. "Otherwise, you'd be finished and on your way by now."

"On our way…" Kirk said, stopping himself in his impatient mood.

"If you would, please," McCrae said, gesturing toward them with one old, blotchy hand, stretched out from an entirely black Starfleet Intelligence tunic, while the other hand seemed suspended in the dark, pointing them up the way he'd come. And so they climbed the black stairs, in the dark hanger, following the man who seemed to command the very shadows themselves.

McCrae disappeared into a room up the stairs and ahead of them, and as they caught up, everything was suddenly impossibly white inside, including the admiral's own tunic, slacks, boots and all, through some chameleonic gimmickry, probably a sudden power charge through the clothing fibers, altering the molecular structure from black to white, using certain 23rd Century paints or dyes. He had to double-check to see that his own golden-brown tunic, and Spock's blue science shirt, hadn't changed as well, before he noticed they stood around a white table, in the blindingly lit room.

"Won't you sit down," McCrae sighed, his voice as comforting as an oboe, though his expression seemed frozen, in this arctic chamber. Against the plain glowing walls and floor, the little imperfections in his skin, and even the tiniest terra-cotta veins in his old eyes, stood out like gashes.

A moment later, something awful happened, as if Kirk had blinked and missed some terrible murder right before his very eyes: a frail little body had appeared before them on the table, bloody and mutilated. Its head was odd and huge, though the face was as small as an old woman's below the great brain-case, and stony brow. The penetrating eyes seemed infinitely weary. The captain sat down, like an unwilling participant at a cannibal's dinner table, and watched as McCrae counted-up all the open gashes in the forehead, like distant birds silhouetted against a wintry sky.

He glanced across the table at Spock, as if expecting the science officer to share his schoolboy's air of revulsion. But, instead, Spock seemed utterly transfixed. It had been, well, nearly three years, but after a moment Kirk recognized the tiny alien form as a Talosian, a member of a dying race of telepaths so feared and powerful, they were cordoned off to live their last days buried inside a planet under strict Federation quarantine. Except of course, for this one, he supposed. It seemed to hypnotize Spock, even after an obviously brutal death.

"Words hardly suffice," McCrae sighed, finally, having quietly counted up the chaos of all the wounds across the corpse's head. Then he turned to study Mr. Spock's own face, in particular, and Kirk himself had to admit, the Vulcan looked as though he'd been stabbed as well, by some unseen blade.

"Words hardly suffice," McCrae repeated, as if he were a character in a play, in which Mr. Spock had apparently failed to learn his lines. And now it seemed to Jim Kirk the story had somehow become entirely about Mr. Spock, and this alien body, so far from its natural grave.

"Explain," Kirk said, now angry at the admiral's apparent need to embarrass, or to be more precise, humiliate his close friend.

Mr. Spock cleared his throat, something he would never do in a formal setting, under normal circumstances at all. At last, he spoke, and his words seemed embroidered, each one, by a Vulcan intensity that might pass for shame, in a lesser race.

"I had, perhaps," the Vulcan began, his eyes wandering along the edge of the white table, where holographic blood pooled in a river and tributaries of shallow lines, and vanished as it reached the edge, "believed too much in the good will of…"

"In the good will of an alien race? Desperate to save itself from forced extinction?" McCrae interrupted, nodding in false sympathy, quietly becoming more scornful than the worst sarcasm. "So desperate were they, that, upon your first encounter on Talos IV, they lured your ship into their system with a false distress signal, and Captain Pike, along with two female crewmen, as part of some ridiculous plan to revive their ruined world? Using the offspring of Starfleet officers like herds of cattle, to rebuild an entire civilization?" Each new question made his vocal woodwinds harsher, as the admiral's face grew red against his white collar. "A noble plan," McCrae smiled, "marred only by an… unbroken string of utterly despicable acts."

"My chief concern," the Vulcan began, blinking and breathing in a strange, uneven pace, "was the welfare of my previous captain, so gravely injured that no science we know could treat him. It was with that motive alone that I brought him back, years later, to…"

"Talos IV," Kirk nodded, remembering the death sentence Spock faced—was it two and a half years ago? For his noble deed? "But you can't try a man twice for the same crime," the current captain of the _Enterprise_ insisted, now fully McCrae's equal in righteous indignation.

The admiral's look of withering disdain seemed to suggest that he could do pretty much anything he wanted to, to anyone, and find a way to keep it secret if he chose. Finally, the moment of quiet that followed, along with the lifeless body in their midst, reduced their passions to a respectful quietude, allowing a tense silence pushed through the room like a glacier.

"The only problem with your Vulcan heart," McCrae said at last, "is its lack of practiced discretion. No one questions your devotion to Captain Pike, but a human heart grows used to its own passions, and accepts some awful truths as inevitable, and regrettably… un-fixable. Perhaps, if you'd merely had the emotional perspective, to come to terms with Captain Pike's unfortunate condition," the admiral nearly shrugged, "none of this would ever have had to happen."

"None of what?" Kirk demanded, for nothing had really been explained yet.

"It did occur to me," Spock said, almost inaudibly, "sometime later, that the telepaths of Talos IV might eventually unlock Captain Pike's mind, and perhaps… trick him… into restoring their ancient technology, through his own intuitive mechanical brilliance." The words, though kind to the memory of his former commander, seemed like ashes in his mouth.

"And like any being on any world _other _than Vulcan," McCrae said, seemingly grateful at last to be near the end of a very unpleasant conference, "their ambitions have become all-consuming. Probably without Captain Pike's ever really understanding their larger purpose," McCrae continued, wiping his brow and turning away, mercifully, at last. "Or, let us hope that to be the case."

The admiral began pacing around the table, ponderously close behind each commander in his chair, as he went around. "It's quite probable that Captain Pike, in his diminished physical state, never knew what they were up to. He may have thought he was preparing his own escape, or merely distracting himself with some novel, unknown science, to while away the hours: as they presented him with one ancient, forgotten machine after another."

Now even Kirk's anger chilled, as he imagined the hungry mind of Chris Pike, feasting upon some rare, magical machinery, buried far below the surface of Talos IV: the oddest playthings a man might ever find, and just when he thought his adventures had all run out.

"I hesitate to ask," Kirk said at last, "but where…" his eyes swept along the length of the corpse before him.

"Where was this one found? Blessedly _not_ on the most populated of planets, Captain. Not on Rigel III, nor on Earth; nor on the great teaching planets. At least, not yet. But word travels fast. And pictures and a few unfortunate comments from retired officers have all raised certain questions. And in the meantime, we have no way of controlling that chatter, if the denizens of Talos IV choose to lurk among us."

"With their power of illusion," Kirk said, his words coming in fragments as his mind raced along.

"I'm sure you understand the danger," McCrae said, professorially.

"If I didn't know better, I might wonder," Kirk said, folding his arms uncomfortably over his chest, "if my whole life had been an illusion, if these creatures were on the loose. Never knowing if I were a slave, or a fool, or… just living someone else's dreams. If… even my dreams were not my own."

"If you were capable of wondering, at all," the admiral nodded, and clucked his lips together. At last, he touched the edge of the white table, and the holographic corpse mercifully vanished, along with all the guilty streams of orange blood around its head.

"And at that point," McCrae said, stepping around where the Talosian head had been a few seconds ago, "illusion becomes the power beyond all powers. Along with the fear born of that power's very existence. And, if they can trick Captain Pike into doing their bidding, who among us is safe?"

"How do you clean up… something like that?" Kirk was utterly perplexed.

"I'm so glad you asked, Captain Kirk," the admiral said, a funny half-smile playing on his face, like a challenge, as he walked back to the white door. And, as he stepped outside, his tunic and slacks and boots all turned black again, and the two _Enterprise _commanders got up and followed back into the dark hanger. Now they stood at the top of that seemingly invisible staircase, and McCrae spoke again with that little smile, that might have been reassuring under almost any other circumstance.

"Oh, and Mr. Spock," he began, just as the Vulcan passed, causing him to turn around with a trace of surprise or even anguish. "There are those, in my branch, who believe," McCrae continued, smiling all the while, "…who believe that you, as a partial telepath yourself, may be operating in sympathy with this adversary. I do hope you can prove them wrong."

Slowly, Jim Kirk turned to find the black hand-rail, and take the first step down on the metal tread, his boot clanging quietly against it, down into the hanger. McCrae's voice, taunting once again, stopped him, half-way down.

"You're really neither fish nor fowl, are you, Mr. Spock?" The words echoed in the dark.

And with that, the admiral vanished behind them, like a ghost, or like that dead body on the table. Kirk realized—the admiral had protected himself from contamination by them—though Kirk hardly had any contact with a Talosian, himself, and Spock, barely any more than that. But, as far as Starfleet was concerned, even that meant they were already damaged goods. Holograms were all they could be trusted with, now.

The damage, too, from McCrae's final, zoological observation was also done, and both commanders knew exactly what the head of intelligence had meant, before he disappeared with his sententious little smile: that a man like Spock, being half-Vulcan and half-human, would always be the first to be suspected in any question of betrayal.

"Here's your hat, what's your hurry," Kirk mused, trying to change the subject.

As they climbed down into the echoing chamber, wondering what would come next, a shaft of light opened up in the center of the hanger, and then another, and several more, until they could see a smallish black ship resting before them, with a fuselage that was about the size of a half-dozen shuttlecraft. It was fitted with very large warp engines, for its size, and coated with a black finish. Cautiously at first, they circled the scout ship, taking note of each odd armor plate and sensor intake and weapons muzzle scattered across the top and bottom.

Once they'd come full-circle, a hatch opened with a vacuum _gasp!_ Kirk raised his eyebrows and led the way inside, up a little series of rungs, into the stealthy little craft.

Of course, the crawl-way and then the central corridor from stem to stern was very cramped, and studded with knobs and panels and lights and smaller hatches, and four small cabins—nothing like the broad corridors on the _Enterprise_, a ship that was meant to be lived in, self-contained, for years. Just squeezing up to its control cabin seemed to take almost as much time as a stroll from his quarters on deck five, up to the bridge—though the actual distance was less than a walk to the turbolift. The two men catapulted themselves, gymnast-style, into the padded pilots' seats, and all at once the control panels before them came to glittering life, with dozens of Duotronic readouts.

"At least that part's familiar," the captain said, relieved. He studied the computer panels at his fingertips for a moment, before toying with the astrogation controls, which were also quite like a starship's.

"Controls are locked," he said, with a trace of surprise, being used to making his own path, out along the edge of the galaxy. He tried to program the navigation system once again, touching a button here, and then another there.

"This ship's course must have been programmed in advance, Captain," Spock said, turning his gaze out the forward slanting portals, to a black wall that suddenly seemed to be splitting in half: revealing more blackness beyond, and the bright distant stars. Finally, Kirk too gave in to the ship's computer, watching helplessly as they emerged on the far end of the Starbase, and out of sight of the _Enterprise_, if she was even there anymore_._ Once they'd made safe-distance on impulse power, the little ship's hulking engines came thrumming to life. And, without any command or warning, they simply disappeared into warp space.

But, two hours later, Kirk could stand it no longer.

"I hope you're not… taking this too hard, Mr. Spock," he said, embarrassed to bring it up at all. But when he glanced over at his friend, the Vulcan was as unreadable as ever, though perhaps he nodded in acknowledgement of Kirk's thoughtfulness. Only the quiet voices of the cockpit computers, announcing little reports and statuses, filled the awkward silence. Eventually, Jim Kirk excused himself and roamed down through the ship, learning many of its secrets.

There wasn't really that much to see, just the plain cabins, with their empty hammocks, a transporter booth, and various wall consoles to sustain life and nutrition, and a weapons closet with two sets of big phaser rifles and pistols. Finally the captain squeezed up the central gangway again, and up into the big pilot's seat. He allowed himself one quick probing glance at the science officer, whose attention to the instruments had hardened to a hawk-like intensity .

"ETA?" Kirk said, as casually as he could manage.

"Fourteen hours, seventeen minutes, eleven seconds at warp sixteen."

"What do you think," Kirk finally said, studying the computer readouts at his finger-tips, "we'll find when we get there?"

"Unknown. Clearly, if one of them has made it off-world, some greater number of them may have also moved out into other systems. Some may still remain."

"What about Chris Pike," Kirk said.

Spock allowed himself to lean back slightly, as if surrendering to the inevitable. His lower lip thrust upward, almost truculently, though it might have been nothing more than his own uncertainty.

"Survival rates for victims of Prometheus radiation vary widely," he said, quietly. "The flesh and organs are simultaneously ravaged and regenerated, like the entrails of the titan Prometheus, himself, in the first part of a dramatic trilogy, based on your Earth legend. But without adequate medical attention…" His voice trailed off for a moment, and Captain Kirk had to resist the temptation to interrupt.

"I would assign a very low probability to his survival," the Vulcan finished, at last. Then, his only emotional reaction (if it could even be described as such) was to blink once, and purse his lips again, as if to swallow some unspeakably human sentiment.

"Mr. Spock," Kirk began, "I'm not sure I have the right to ask this, but… how _different _was your relationship with Captain Pike, from ours?" He felt like a worried wife, asking "was she _prettier _than me." But, he knew, it was also a key to understanding everything that led up to this moment.

The first officer allowed his head to rear back slightly, in open surprise, though his dark eyes stared straight ahead, through the forward portal. "I was somewhat younger. But, if you are implying Captain Pike was a sort of 'father figure,' I would remind you that Vulcan psychology is somewhat different from that of humans."

"But you're both."

The science officer's shoulders sank slightly, at being reminded again of his mixed heritage, and how it may have betrayed him, and now all of them. "I am incapable of analyzing feelings that have never broached my consciousness. And," he added, in a moment of surprising vulnerability, "I am equally unable to assess any feelings that may have colored my relationship, without my knowledge."

"Fair enough," Kirk said, no closer to understanding than before. "But if I ever… end up like Chris Pike," he said, beginning to smile in spite of himself, "I hope you'll rescue me from a burn ward, too."

"The statistical probability of any starship commander ending his years in a persistent vegetative state has proven to be extremely low. They rarely last long enough." Then, after a moment, "but should such a thing ever come to pass, I will certainly do my utmost to put you in more favorable circumstances."

"Thank you, Mr. Spock," Kirk nodded, imagining the Vulcan spiriting him away to some planet of buxom amazons, somewhere in the unknown reaches of the galaxy, when his own good luck had finally run out. Then he busied himself with the cockpit's scanners, which showed the Talos star-system about to appear on the wide, narrow portals ahead. But, in his own mind, it was clear that Chris Pike was more than a commander to the younger Spock.

Talos IV, on the long-range sensor, resembled a little circle of diseased tissue, as seen through an old optical microscope. Its surface was faintly illumined by an ancient star, to reveal dull pewter swathes of cloud, and bruised vistas where some kind of oceans once rolled. The exposed purple of the sea beds reminded Kirk of the terrible radiation burns that had scarred Captain Pike's own face.

Shattered cliffs stood where mountains had soared, a dusty continent on an equally dusty sea now. And all the cities that glittered upon its breast were long gone. But, as Spock had learned, a few thousand inhabitants had managed to survive underground, using their mental powers to lure unsuspecting ships from the nearest space-lanes, to be imprisoned in deep volcanic chambers. There, those poor captains and whatever crews they had were forced to relive old and loves and battles, for the amusement of their dream-masters, as all concerned just withered away. Long before their time, their explorers' lives had turned to the stuff of nursing homes, or asylums.

They also knew that only a tiny handful of those thousands of "keepers" had ever been seen, when the _Enterprise _first answered a false distress signal, and they disappeared inside a long-dead volcano with the cruelly disfigured Captain Pike, when the _Enterprise _finally returned again, less than three years ago. At the time, it seemed like a harmless enough arrangement: the last of the telepaths tending to a legendary captain in his last, helpless days.

"Well, you know what they say," Kirk said, as though he were reading Spock's mind, for a change. "Every officer has that 'one planet' they just keep coming back to. Whether they want to, or not," he added, as if you couldn't have picked a much worse one if you tried.

"Indeed," Spock said, still very quiet, and almost to himself.

"No sign of warning, from the deep space buoys," Kirk said, checking the instruments quizzically, wondering if they'd see any warning shots across their bow, as they entered the quarantined system.

"Our passage may have been cleared by Starfleet." Another minute or two passed.

"Do you ever wonder," Kirk said, almost whimsically, "if we haven't just been stuck back there ourselves, on Talos, and if all of this isn't just some sort of illusion?"

"They were quite clear about their motives," the Vulcan tilting his head, as if to review his calculations once more, afresh. "Repopulate their ruined world, as the air and land gradually healed itself, if it wasn't too late already. Perhaps they hoped to live through their new colonists, or merge consciences with them entirely, to retake their own world one day... However, I, myself, am quite certain I have not been part of some vast repopulation effort, thus far." There was an awkward pause after that declaration.

"That's easy for you to say, Mr. Spock! Some of us can't be so sure!" Kirk said, unable to keep from smiling at the sudden thought that all his own sexual conquests since they dropped-off Captain Pike might just have been an illusion, to disguise a clever breeding program they'd been caught in, unawares.

"Indeed," Spock said, seeming to acknowledge Kirk's sudden doubts. "You may have had a different set of experiences."

Jim Kirk decided to mark that down as a rare joke from his science officer, in hopes his mood might brighten. The captain excused himself and crawled out of the tiny nose of the ship, and back down the submarine-type corridor, bristling with grab-holds and blinking environmental read-outs, along with various control panels for docking and hatches, till he finally stepped inside the little closet that passed for a shared bunk room: two semi-rigid hammocks and a metallic communications grill on the wall. He climbed into the lower one hammock, swaying gently as he fell asleep.

Six hours later, right on cue, he woke up and stumbled up the long, squeezed corridor on his way to the cockpit. The rooms on either side looked like tiny jail cells, without bars.

And there was Mr. Spock, looking strangely transfixed, as if he were locked in some kind of horrific telepathic struggle already. It occurred to Jim Kirk to shake him a bit, and see if he was all right but, then again, that just might make things worse.

The pathetic old Talos sun was now faintly visible in the upper left of the screen, as the ship made its final arc toward the fourth planet in orbit. The other worlds didn't look much better—they passed a monstrous gas giant that seemed puffed with false pride, tilting and laughing like a fat man just off to the lower left, as the sun gazed back, looking tiny and cold by comparison. Inside Talos IV's orbit, the inner three worlds were too small to see with the naked eye, but eventually Kirk thought he could just barely discern one of them, adrift in the lonely middle. And here was Talos IV growing before them: he wondered if it might finally, perversely, be safe—now that the rest of the galaxy faced the threat of their rule.

Suddenly Spock snapped out of it, as if he'd been in a very deep trance or buried under an avalanche of memories. His fingers tapped on the controls, and the captain could see he was working up his report.

"Life form readings?" Kirk knew that was the first thing the scientist was calling up from the sensors.

"There are signs of at least two beneath the surface. Though, whether they are Talosians, or merely the last prisoners of their menagerie, remains unclear."

"And Captain Pike?" There was another dreadful pause, as Spock looked down at the blinking instruments.

"Negative. Preparing to enter orbit," Spock added, only occasionally touching a light pad on the sweeping console before them.

Kirk nodded, wanting to ask about that strange, trance-like episode but, somehow, thinking it might be too personal, filled with too many empty dreams. This time, at least, Spock had been able to fight his way off his own dead Talos.

"Anything else to report?" Obviously, the captain couldn't quite give up his curiosity.

"Signs of minor renewal of the planet's atmosphere and soil balance, some three-quarters' million standard years after a cataclysmic war."

"Anything else to report… on your own… status?"

Inevitably, there was a moment's pause, not as awkward as it would have been on the busy bridge of the USS _Enterprise_, but it did seem to Jim Kirk that his friend and first officer was trying to remove the king of clubs from the middle of a very large house of cards, while leaving the rest of the structure perfectly intact. The Vulcan swallowed once, before speaking.

"I was simply trying to prepare myself. Logically, I should also offer to prepare you, mentally, for any illusions that may… overwhelm your own better judgment."

"That would be fine, Mr. Spock," he said, diplomatically, as the puss-colored planet rolled just off the port-side, its old sea beds aching beneath icy mountains.

After first trying to lay hands on the captain across the gap between the two pilots' seats, they realized they'd have to get up and stand in the little vestibule at the rear of the cockpit, in order to exchange thoughts in the usual manner. So, there they were, Kirk kneeling like an acolyte before a saint, whose long orange fingers pressed the nerves and blood vessels in the Iowa farm boy's cheeks and temples, and behind his human jaw, till Jim Kirk thought he might be in danger of passing out.

And then there was the strangely beautiful rush of something like sparkling numbers and equations, and an odd joy in peacefulness: a reassurance that he could open his mind. It was, at first, like looking over a very tall building's edge, except that everything below was rushing up at him, windows and transports and pedestrians far below, people from his past, from Spock's past; windows of days passing by, flying up to the sky behind him, and the occasional unpredictability, like an odd, spectral, holographic giraffe, or perhaps a hundred moments of shared duty on board their great starship.

And then it was a strange rush of conviction, the kind you never feel when you're actually doing the everyday things you take for granted. But suddenly every relationship in Jim Kirk's life became ten times stronger, more valuable, and everything he just assumed would always be there was fiercely stamped into his soul, like the souls of women: like loving fire-brands that would show his true self's ownership, and anchor him to his previous reality. At the same time, his heart was pounding like an old piston engine about to explode from within. How could a cold-hearted Vulcan understand anything about the importance of human relations, in this way? And how could a half-Vulcan ever even admit to understanding? But the two men communicated that very idea, if only for a moment because, of course, they didn't know where all of this would lead them a day or a week or even a year from now.

And, as much as he hated to accept the notion, it was soon over. Spock disengaged his iron grip from Kirk's face, and the pressures all equalized, and he gasped a deep, cool breath, feeling slightly dizzy.

"Shall I prepare the transporter, Captain?" Spock was helping him up from the metal mesh deck, and then Kirk supported himself with a hand on the back of the pilot's seat.

"Yes, Mr. Spock," he answered, turning to gaze down on Talos IV through the rectangular portals, and knowing this could all still be a terrible mistake. But what could they do, turn and run? The ship itself seemed hard-wired to bring them here. He could only hope it would get them out again, and on to the next step after this, assuming there weren't hundreds of Talosians down there, angrily waiting for them. And, even as he turned and climbed into the pilot's seat, Spock had gone the other way, his boots clanging down to a sealed, armored cabin with the transporter controls inside.

Hard to believe that such a poor excuse for a planet could hold the key to the fate of everyone he'd ever known, across the galaxy, one way or another, in his soul, or through invasion: a rock full of hidden veins and crypts, crawling with tepid, parasitic telepaths, and their wounded, misguided specimens shivering in permanent confinement, and permanent illusion. He let his first full breath in orbit slowly escape his lungs, wondering if he really saw a bit of mist curling from his lips.

And then there was the problem of Chris Pike, left in the worst of medical circumstances, conveniently presumed near death, conveniently presumed to be of no harm or interest to anyone. Except that his mind was still intact. Along with his ingenuity. And (for better or worse) his hopes, as well.

What were they supposed to do? Bring Pike back to Starfleet in chains, in his motorized wheelchair, for somehow unleashing the keepers? How much worse could this get for Spock?

"Not much of a postcard," Kirk sighed, as he and Spock looked around, at the foot of a blasted hill-top. They climbed up a dirt path to where an ancient elevator pad sat within the ruins, where a phaser cannon had shattered many tons of rock, on Spock's first visit.

"Their captives themselves became the postcards, from the worlds and lives they left behind," Spock said, with a trace of bitterness, mumbling the hideous truth. "Each was received here by one cruel deception or another," he added, as they felt the beaming pad beneath them _whir_ to life. "Bringing visions of faraway empires, to amuse these ruined people."

The grasping rocks seemed to ascend up and around them, and fear rolled itself into a ball inside Kirk's stomach. He immediately tried to crush it, clenching his abdominal muscles tight.

He didn't know quite what to expect, except that he knew it would seem extremely, inescapably real to him, whenever it finally happened. And the Talosians wasted no time.

For as soon as they began their descent on a large round elevator pad, he was suddenly whisked away to some filthy prison cell. It was dark and rank and he was pressed-in among too many other prisoners, all stripped of their clothing, like Russian dissidents on old Earth. And he realized, with a sick feeling, that he had been trapped there for years. His sense of revulsion was doubled by a momentary glimpse of his own lost humanity. It taunted him, even as he was pushed this way and that in the stinking unseen crowd, pressing against him on all sides—hearing only the occasional sobbing or sighs in the dark around him, and the splatter of urine against a nearby corner. His own skin was pricked by lice, and his belly panged with hunger, even though his nostrils caught a hundred different scents of dirt and disease. And in a moment, another ten years had passed. And another ten years began unfolding before him, as he shifted from one foot to another, half-asleep in this Earthly cage. He was overwhelmed by the pure barbarism and hopelessness that drowned his senses.

Then, not nearly so real at first, he could see the dark eyes of Mr. Spock burning into his, and felt himself thrashing around in helpless terror. And he emerged, gasping, from this first, long dark trial that day. Gradually, Spock lifted each of his finger-tips from Jim Kirk's face, releasing pressure on his neural pathways, allowing him his own natural human dignity once more.

"Thank you… Mr. Spock," was all he could think to say, as he finally began to look around, still half-bent over, his hands on his thighs as he caught his breath. They were still on the elevator pad, but some meters (or even kilometers) down into the planet, where the occasional drop of unseen water _plinked _away in the hollow magma tunnels that stretched out in all directions.

He got up, latching his own arm across that of his first officer and, with great effort, he pushed the last memory of the filthy, crowded cell back into the farthest recesses of his mind. "At least we know… the welcoming committee hasn't died out yet," he said, stepping down from the platform, toward a long corridor of ancient, rough rock.

"So it would seem," the Vulcan said, drawing his tricorder as they struck out. Kirk took his phaser off his waistband, and the trilling of the tricorder, and the click of their black boots, made the only sound as they walked. Caves, he thought, running through a list familiar to any Earth man: water, stalactites, stalagmites, slime pits, bats. But the only pitfalls, or diseased little fliers, he could think of now would spring from the dark of the mind. "One that way," Spock said, nodding to his right, having registered a life-form.

"If I had a credit… for every tunnel, under every planet," Kirk said, trying to sound light-hearted, "I could _buy_ a planet. And then spend all the rest of the credits… digging tunnels." Spock, looking into his tricorder, did not appear to have registered the joke. And, immediately, Kirk admonished himself, as he would have done to any younger officer under his command: if Starfleet had wanted a comedian along, they would have nabbed Dr. McCoy, too. But the chief medical officer of the USS _Enterprise _had nothing to do with creating this whole mess, and Kirk was only there (he supposed) to provide some kind of back-up, as one who may also have been tainted by the thought waves of the Talosians…

"Seventy point four-one meters ahead," Spock said, very quietly, as if they were walking through an unusually dank hospital, so as not to disturb any ghostly patients around them. Soon, darkened cells appeared up ahead, where specimens, or prisoners, once languished behind unbreakable glass.

"If you sense another mental illusion, coming our way," Captain Kirk said, equally quietly, "feel free to warn me. That last one seemed to go on forever."

"I, too, suffered some false imagery," Spock said, without going into any detail. "In reality, it lasted somewhat less than a minute, however."

"When you're in it," Kirk laughed bitterly, "the long passage of time is a very real part of the illusion."

"Agreed," Spock said and, in a minute or so, he touched Kirk on the shoulder, pointing to a dark glass wall just ahead. Kirk strode forward, scratching his upper lip, and re-holstering his weapon, in a show of good will.

Then he stopped, peering into the dim cage where their sensor readings had led them. He looked around for a moment, till he spotted a dim, solitary lump in a far corner. Carefully, he stepped up on a rocky ledge, and cupped his hands against the glass, to screen out reflections from outside.

All at once, and at great speed, the lump lunged toward him from about five meters' distance, slamming against the glass wall with an echoing "_thrum!_" Kirk stumbled backwards, and was barely caught from falling by his first officer. When he looked up again, he could see a hairy humanoid, with a pig-like snout and dark beady eyes, pressing against the transparency, fogging the glass with heavy breathing from the other side.

After a moment, though, as if he were disappointed, the pig-like creature shuffled back to his corner, and curled up again.

"I'm Captain James T. Kirk, of the Starship _Enterprise_," Kirk said, a bit loudly, to penetrate the glass, and also as if to penetrate whatever else contained the Tellarite, for this was the species of creature they'd found.

No reaction. Kirk checked over his shoulder, to find Mr. Spock waiting within arms' distance, as if he might stumble or collapse again at any moment from another mysterious illusion, or alien assault. This was, at once, both comical and annoying, and he looked again, to make sure the Vulcan wasn't simply teasing.

"It would appear," Spock said, observing the alien's attitude with interest, "that he has assumed you are simply another illusion yourself, possibly in a long string of unwelcomed dreams." But Kirk was less than entranced. If he had to make up a great argument in favor of his own existence, to every prisoner in this underground penitentiary, and why they should want to escape, he'd never get out himself.

"Go away!" the Tellarite grumbled, curling up in the far corner, like a very bristly, unattractive dog.

"Don't you want to leave this planet?" Kirk asked. "We could take you back to Tellar, or wherever you like!"

The Tellarite grudgingly, raised his boar-like head up and then propped it on his paw, with its curved black claws, the very picture of disinterest; as if he had no intention of coming along.

"Do you know," he asked at last, with a kind of very dry sarcasm, "who I am?"

"No sir, I'm afraid I don't," Kirk said, as graciously as he could.

"I am Hof. _General _Hof. And as a superior officer, I am accustomed to a certain amount of respect. I am also the most celebrated dreamer on _this_ planet," Hof added, becoming more and more proud and angry as he spoke, his voice quavering at his own undeserved obscurity, and raising himself up to a sitting position. "Every year we have a ceremony to name the one dreamer who dreams the greatest dreams. And every year, it is I who claims the greatest victory of the dreamers' 'dreaming competition'!"

By now, the Tellarite's voice had become louder, and one of his paws extended like a fist in their direction. "Every year, all the dreamers of this world are gathered together in their most elegant finery," Hof said, slowly rising on his haunches, like a rusty-colored bear, standing hunched over. "Every year," he said, his little piggy eyes glowing with dew, "they rise to their feet and applaud the great General Hof, for his most dramatic dreams: the great wars he must fight; the tragic loves he must leave behind; the wit and daring of his every word and move…" Hof stepped forward into the center of his cage, as if upon on a noble stage, in a spotlight purest white. His hands seemed to tear open his very heart within his chest. "And every year, all the master keepers bow down in gratitude, and bestow upon me, their highest honor," he said, holding out both paws, trembling, as if to take a golden trophy.

"Did you," Kirk began, before remembering to couch the question in an amenable manner, "as a _military_ leader, did you know another prisoner here? A Captain Christopher Pike?"

Hof looked over Kirk's head, from his vantage point a step above, in the proscenium of the exhibit, thinking of the other captain's name, and then shook his head.

"No. And I am not a prisoner!" the Tellarite added, raising a crude fist to the glass, before pounding it on his chest.

"How did you …end up here?"

"It was a great space battle. Surely you must have heard," Hof said, and he turned a bit, seeming to hear the sound of a distant call to war, from a haunting alien _shofar_.

Kirk simply waited, as if the bubble, inevitably, had to burst.

"I have been loyal," Hof harrumphed, "to my command. I have been loyal to my troops," he said, his articulated paw coming up in a quivering salute. "I have met every challenge with fierce commitment, and unquestioning resolve…"

Kirk bowed his head in deference, but glanced up warily, dreading the moment when Hof finally awoke from his sleepwalking.

"I have marched in great victory parades," he insisted, "I have climbed the speaker's stand. I have pounded my fist and raised fearful thousands to courage and passion!"

Hof's gaze swept over Kirk's head again, nodding to the thunderous chants of the unseen hordes. His fur-covered arms finally rose up, as well. He almost seemed to settle his piggy eyes on the starship captain, but he looked back over the dream-crowd again, as the power of illusion overcame him.

Kirk couldn't have been contemptuous or sarcastic, seeing the Tellarite in these depths of neglect, abandoned by his keepers. Every other member of Hof's species that he'd ever met had weighed at least a hundred kilos, and this one was down much closer to seventy. It was almost a miracle the "general" was still standing at all.

"Fascinating," Spock said, at last. "He imagines a sort of acting awards ceremony, which he always wins." Kirk tried to keep his face impassively blank, but he was inwardly horrified. Was this to be the fate of the entire galaxy, in the hands of the oncoming keepers? To make every man a raving egomaniac, a slave to dreams? To the most outrageous vanities, even while they lay impoverished in bondage and in squalor?

"General," Kirk said, as if the Tellarite's outburst had not really happened at all. "We'd like to take you home now. You've had a long and illustrious career, but your home world needs you, and misses you." The words, far from being sarcastic, touched something in Kirk himself, a kind of home-sickness borne of years' travelling in uncharted space.

The Tellarite seemed affected too, and began to snuffle quietly. He turned away, as if in shame.

"This is just another trick. Be gone!"

Kirk stepped back again, and drew his phaser. He adjusted a little dial on top, and leveled the pistol-like device to one side of the thick glass. He pulled the trigger, and a searing red beam of leapt out, slowly melting a hole large enough for a man to climb through.

On the other side, the Tellarite had stumbled backward, raising his furry arms as if against a burning building, so horrified was he, and so shocked by the powerful burst of light. Kirk holstered the weapon again, and calmly stretched forth a hand to help the boar-man through the smoking melted scar. But the general wouldn't budge. Kirk looked back at the Vulcan, with an air of disbelief.

Then, the Tellarite blinked hard, and Jim Kirk climbed into the cage. As he approached, Hof snorted enigmatically, perhaps in a warning, and his body trembled with excitement.

"Well, it's been a great day," Kirk said, on sudden inspiration, raising Hof's arm like the winner of a fight, right after a boxing match, as if Hof stood over some beaten and bloody opponent on the canvas. For a moment, man and Tellarite looked as if they could both truly hear the endless crowds of cheering thousands, stretching out to some imaginary horizon. And then, gently, he marched the general off to the phaser hole like a light-weight boxing champ, to squeeze through the imaginary ropes on the outer edge. The good news was that, in his present condition, Hof simply slipped through the burn hole with very little extra effort. They stood with Spock now, out in the long corridor.

"General," the Vulcan inquired calmly, "may I ask how long you have been on this planet?" The Tellarite paused, slowly growing aware of a steady light breeze sweeping through the tunnel, a breeze he didn't seem to remember ever feeling before. He looked confused.

"A very long time," Hof said, shaking once, like an old dog that had escaped a tangled fence: surprised and even a bit happy, to suddenly be free. It was as if his whole psychological perspective had changed in a minute, simply by crossing the barrier.

"And what became of the keepers?" Kirk had to restrain himself from shaking Hof out of what was left of his sleep.

The general paused, and thought hard for a moment, eyes downcast. Finally, he shook his head, without speaking.

"But they're not all gone," Kirk insisted, still aghast at all the years he'd just spent, in a Stalinist prison cell, when they'd first arrived.

"Perhaps," Hof said, now very confused. "Everything else was gone, every food, every water. And the keepers with it. Now it's only the ghosts, and the dreams that never die." It made Kirk wonder if that was all it was, that swallowed him up when they came down on the elevator pad, from the surface: the echo of someone else's dying nightmare.

"How did you survive," the captain asked, though no man ever really wants to know the full answer.

Hof looked up suddenly, as if he might rush at the captain again, out of helpless fury. "I used to be three times this size!" he bellowed, at last, lamenting his diminished state. A moment passed, as the human looked around one last time, at this stretch of tunnels and empty cells.

"Let's go," Kirk said. Spock pointed down the rough rocky corridor again, and on they went, Kirk supporting the Tellarite, holding him gently by the elbow.

They passed another dozen or so cages, all empty, till they finally came to one that already had a phaser hole burned through it, from years ago. And, all alone, inside sat a cube-like wheelchair. And on top of that, like the crumbled bust of some ancient stone-carver, the slumped head and shoulders of the late Christopher Pike, his brown wiry hair now thin and white and long.

He didn't want to stare, but could tell at a glance that Pike had been dead for some months, at least. The scars that ravaged the older captain's face had worn away, revealing the usual ligament and bone underneath, and sunken gray swamps where the eyes had been.

Spock, for many years his faithful lieutenant, climbed through the open phaser-hole, into the "human exhibit" where Pike and a female Earth scientist had spent their last few years together. The Vulcan's eyes barely left the polished stone floor as he approached the medi-cube. He also barely glanced at the tricorder, even as his orange-tinged fingers made the appropriate maneuvers around the little control panel, and it seemed that he was in some kind of a trance between hard realities, as if he finally came to understand the meaning of all fictions: to escape the hopelessness, and the finality, of the grave.

Kirk backed away, out in the corridor, a half step or so, and saw General Hof standing with his furry arms folded across his equally furry belly. He, too, noticed Spock had seemingly frozen: his back to them, inside the cage, as the two non-Vulcans stood waiting patiently. But, after a few moments, Hof struck out impatiently, swinging his arms, and walking till he was seen no longer, marching as if with great purpose. Just then, Kirk realized, there had been no sign of the Earth woman.

Spock down-loaded the medical information from the computer that was built-in to the chair, about his mentor's inevitable decline and death. The high-pitched _whir _of his tricorder laid down a sort of meditative, warbling song, as if all of this was simply the way of the Universe, and no need to cry. Though it seemed to Spock, in a strange way, he had come to the very edge of the Universe, and now teetered right there on the dizzying brink, as if looking for his old commander, who'd finally stepped off. And no life-support contrivance, such as the medi-cube, could record any steps beyond that.

The science officer was vaguely aware of his own reflection, and Captain Pike's, in the big glass barrier along the tunnel, out of the corner of his eye. And he had the unavoidable recollection of some old entertainment screen, for home viewing: as if Pike had simply retired from exploring the galaxy, and decided to relax in his favorite chair, and watch the life go by till he fell asleep. His pose, facing out, suggested he had finally turned the tables on the actual watchers, though there were none left to see.

Jim Kirk noted a little gold fragment of cloth lay on a shelf across Captain Pike's chest, on the life-support wheelchair. And as Spock fully turned around, Kirk realized it was the _Enterprise_ science and engineering insignia, torn from the officer's blue tunic, several inches above his alien heart, on the left. Now the golden nebula lay there, like a pebble on a tombstone.

Just as well, Kirk told himself: if they were unsuccessful in rounding up thousands of Talosians somehow spread across the galaxy or beyond, each of their commissions were as good as gone. And Christopher Pike's own knowledge and curiosity, which helped knit the whole galaxy together, might now be its undoing as well.

Kirk realized he'd stopped checking for any glimpse of the frail little alien humanoids, with their three-times human-sized brains, mincing through the tunnels like grim, hairless geisha girls. And none had shown up yet on Spock's tricorder. Had they simply lost interest in their few remaining captives?

He looked around beyond the little stage before him, where all Pike's uncounted fantasies had been played out. No Vina. Just a dead old man, and a hole in the glass: as if his soul had burst right through, upon his death. And somewhere down that way, a hairy half-boar, half-man, who seemed perfectly content to go on as a slave to dreams. But where was the beautiful woman?

After several minutes passed, Spock turned away from the body and wiped his eyes. This simple gesture threw Jim Kirk into a pit of despair, too, for a moment. But he had to shake it off to lend a hand as the half-Vulcan climbed through the phaser hole. Instinctively, Spock looked up and down the corridor as his boots touched the floor.

Kirk spoke. "I think we may have made a mistake."

"In releasing the Tellarite?" Spock had seemingly composed himself again, and slung the tricorder's long black strap over his shoulder.

"Yes," Kirk said quietly. "If we were subject to their power, when we first got here, even one of these creatures on the loose could still cause a lot of trouble, if he came under their power again."

"We could beam him over to the ship," Spock suggested, as they slowly began walking after the general.

"Well," Kirk said, with an almost casual air, "let's wait and see what happens."

Spock opened his scanner again, and located General Hof down the hall.

More empty cages, on the left and right. Watching the little screen on the slim black box in his hands, Spock ventured toward each rough oval pane of unbreakable transparency, as if the bodies of more shipwreck victims might lie on the other side.

"I'm not sure," Kirks aid, "but it looks like General Hof may have been the first Federation being, besides a human, in this… zoo. Before Vina, as well."

"The wrong part of space. Fortunately for us," Spock said, distracted by something on the hand-held scanner.

"You said a mouthful." That was the one nice thing you _could _say about Talos IV: it was tucked-away in a very remote part of the galaxy. Far from Earth, and even farther from Rigel, so that whatever naïve travelers they did manage to lure in with a false distress signal would most likely be from parts unknown. Or, from the Starship _Enterprise_.

"I am picking up fragmentary evidence of DNA in some of these cages," Spock said. "Species we've not yet encountered in our exploration."

"Where did they go?" Then, after a pause, the inevitable question, "where did _she _go?"

"No other human readings within sensor range," Spock said.

They walked a hundred meters or so, before finding General Hof slumped against the rocky tunnel wall, sound asleep, in his first hour of freedom.


	2. Chapters 2 and 3

**Chapter Two**

"That way," Spock said, as the two officers approached a fork in the tunnel, where the long stretch of dreamer's cells split in half, and doubled, and perhaps doubled again, farther down. General Hof seemed better off resting against the rounded wall in the distance behind them.

They stopped in front of a particularly dark cage, thinking they could hear a different quality to the air, and smell a different kind of gradual ruination, too. It even seemed there was the slightest, long gap along the top of the glass, which was otherwise so dark inside that the two men could see their own reflections quite clearly, looking brave and quizzical, in descending order of rank.

Spock nodded, consulting the little screen on the tricorder. Jim Kirk had only turned away for a moment, to look at a lonely tree in the center of a terrarium across the corridor, where red flowers still bloomed on twig-like branches, their perfume going to waste inside an air-tight chamber. Gradually, it seemed to him, the tree was sighing quietly, its branches curling and un-curling very slightly, as if it were slumbering, too.

And then there was a loud, clattering sound of Spock's tricorder bouncing across the stony floor, and a surprised gasp. Kirk turned to see a huge, slimy tentacle had scooped up the science officer and held him writhing a meter or so above the pathway, swinging this way and that, trying to get free, as he dangled against the blackened glass.

"No!" Spock gulped, as Kirk whipped out his phaser and raised it to fire at the slithering black appendage. Reluctantly, the captain lowered his weapon, very slowly, watching as the Vulcan dangled there, his face turning greener and greener. Kirk could also see himself in the reflection of the glass, looking equally surprised.

At long last, the shiny dark tentacle relaxed and somehow lowered Mr. Spock down till the tips of his boots touched the floor again, with gentle tapping noise. And, quick as a wink, the long slimy appendage "slurped" back up inside, along the very narrow gap at the top of the barrier. Black water sloshed for a minute or two on the darkened side, and both men stepped back to maintain a very respectful distance.

"Jesus," Kirk exclaimed, looking back and forth from the top of the cage, down to his first officer.

"Or, perhaps, some aquatic god," Spock nodded, pulling his own dampened tunic down to a more presentable fashion. "See how it managed to open a bit of the stone along the top, there," Spock said, taking another deep breath, after his momentary strangulation.

"After that, it's just a long crawl out to freedom," Kirk said, bemused. "But," he added brightly, "a short trip by transporter." They marked the coordinates after Spock picked up his tricorder from the pathway.

For now, though, their survey resumed. After many more seemingly empty cages, they came upon another elevator door. It jangled a strange, musical, welcoming sound, and the door slid open.

_Down_, they both thought and, for whatever actual reason, the big round pad went plummeting, as snatches of cool air buffeted them on the platform, and they descended through more and more levels of abandoned exhibits and cages: faster and faster, the rocks racing past them in a blur, up, up, up, less than an arm's length away.

They finally sank into the greatest cavern by far, and the air opened up around them with a _woosh_! First they saw a huge domed ceiling, rising up as they descended through a great spider-web of lights hanging down, as the natural cave dome seemed to spread farther and farther out, till they could see a whole city of warehouses or semi-industrial buildings. A lone, polished metal pole beneath their platform quickly diminished into the polished stone floor far below. But as they finally stopped on the floor of the cavern, they could see that most structures were actually no larger than large farm sheds, or old-style corn cribs: long and low, stretching off to the underground horizon.

Of course, they were hardly made of mesh, like corn-cribs. Each structure was a solid-looking block of metal, and most of them seemed to hum with a strange power that made Kirk's flesh itchy. Nearly all of the great devices were a uniform pale silver or beige, with the occasional severe black clamps or acid-green buttresses that anchored them to the smooth stone floor, against the mysterious dynamos or other power that spun inside. And, as if by sheer force of gravity, the two commanders were drawn toward the greatest of all these machines, toward what must have been the east.

Spock had his tricorder out again, before Kirk had quite finished being awe-struck by the scale of the construction, and the thrumming of alien forces. He wondered at the contrivances and invisible energy fields that must be hidden deep inside these tank-like structures, devoid of any good old man-made beams of anti-matter or strangely iridescent dilithium crystals, refined and harmonically tuned for racing between the stars.

"Water pumps," Spock said, walking right past, though Kirk had imagined some amazing technological achievement, within the two great churning machines before him. Chastened by Spock's mundane appraisal, the captain turned away, still looking for signs of mystery and wonder.

But it was like walking through an inscrutable museum exhibition of alien cubism: one huge, meaningless boxy shape after another, like abstract art that sprang as rebellion from some unimaginable creative strictures.

"Here," Spock said, his resonant voice echoing in the vast subterranean reaches. Kirk stepped up behind, as they stood by yet another big blob of metal. But this one was different.

A series of blast marks had struck here and there: as if sheer mental power wasn't enough to stop some struggle for this particular row and column of dull, bland mega-machines. But it didn't look worth all the scoring and the violence and death it suggested. In spite of the scale and the ominous hum, it seemed as unspectacular as those water pumps behind them.

"Someone was here… with blasters," Kirk said.

"Indeed, though not of Federation design," Spock said, examining the black splotches on the thick metal shell.

He stepped up on a green buttress and found a gash burned-through, high up on the side. The science officer half-dived in for a better look, the black legs of his trousers and his pointed boots gradually tipping upwards, as he reached in, teeter-tottering on the edge of the blast hole. Finally, like the tentacled captive they had just encountered, Spock's legs just slipped into the dark within.

Jim Kirk imagined, idly, that his friend might have simply had too much and fled—seeing the sad death of his first starship captain, and throwing it all away, to dive into some abyss that would take him as far from Talos as its own natives had seemingly gone themselves, perhaps through the same strange mechanical rabbit hole. And thinking thus, he felt that flash of raw panic again, just for a micro-second, in this maze of unexplained technology. It was not as bad as when he was upstairs, where you could actually see how every captive being had been so thoroughly, psychologically ransacked in its weakness, after a living autopsy that turned the heart and mind inside out, merely for entertainment. Now Kirk was, just for the moment, alone: forcing himself to exhale every dark imagining from his lungs. He opened his own tricorder, and the familiar warbling sound proved calming, even among these overgrown, featureless hulking machines: like the tops of so many swollen craniums, crowding in on every side.

Finally Mr. Spock popped his own head out of the hole in the big tank-like structure, though he was still consulting his own tricorder readings, from the instrument in his right hand, and propping his left elbow up on the blackened edge of the melted hole.

"All the Talosians… gone?" Kirk said, folding his arms and looking this way and then that, down the rows of machines. "And almost all the prisoners, too. And then, this," he added, watching Spock haul himself out altogether now, and then wipe his hands on his black trousers, where the soot wouldn't be noticed.

"So it would seem," Spock said. "And the only two prisoners who remain seemed unwilling or unable to escape, or shed much light on the exodus."

Kirk shook his head, thinking there was nothing that would stand in his way either, if the opportunity presented itself.

"Perhaps there simply… wasn't time," Kirk said.

"This would appear to be some kind of gateway in to other worlds," the Vulcan said, as he stared into his hand-held scanner.

""Though the science behind it…" Spock added, lost in the readings, and finally shaking his head.

"Maybe if you think like Chris Pike," Kirk shrugged, trying to be helpful.

"I should point out that he may have spent all or most of the last two-point-seven years in solving this problem. We have only studied the same equipment for a matter of minutes, thus far," Spock said, a tone of mild reproof, cautioning his newer commander. It was, strangely, a welcomed relief for Kirk, who had worried about the dark cloud hanging over his friend.

Spock extricated himself from up in the alien shell, climbed down a huge metal anchor on the side, dropping to the floor at last. As Kirk watched, the science officer began tapping the screen and juggling the toggle switches next to it with the index fingers of each hand. Suddenly its little screen flickered and the colors around the two men, playing suddenly around the enigmatic machinery, or coming up from the floor, or something else, went all wrong for just a quick half a second. Both men looked up in alarm, as if they'd passed through some force field, unawares.

Spock grabbed Kirk's shoulder and, with very little encouragement, both men stepped outside of a cube of light that had suddenly gathered into focus around them, bidden by Spock's intervention.

"Cover," Kirk said, automatically. They dashed around a corner behind the big, humming tank-like device. Kirk had his phaser out, though Spock continued to hold his tricorder like a weapon of inexhaustible curiosity.

Quick as a flicker, a Talosian appeared, or half-appeared in a mist of pink and twinkling light, and then vanished again, seeming utterly preoccupied with some abstract mathematical problem inside that enormous skull, in his brief appearance.

Both men stepped out into the open, Kirk's phaser and Spock's tricorder still held out at the ready.

"Phaser on full," Kirk said, adjusting the power and pointing his weapon at the great tank Spock had just climbed down from.

"May I suggest," Spock said, "waiting to see if we can better determine their whereabouts, before we destroy their means of transportation?"

Kirk seemed about to argue, but then lowered the phaser without any particular sign of frustration. The Vulcan began poring over the tricorder readings with renewed vigor, in advance of the next apparent beam-through, and the little screen on his tricorder scrolled data so quickly that Kirk could scarcely make out any of the numbers and symbols as they flew by.

"Did you get anything as that keeper transferred through?"

"Yes," Spock said, though he sounded so dour and dismayed that he might just as easily have said "no."

The pink cube appeared again and Kirk drew back, with his free hand tugging gently on Spock's elbow.

"That's from the tricorder," though he spoke as quietly as if he were creeping up on a rare but dangerous animal in the wild. The pink cube, with its strangely giddy gold sparkling interference scattered throughout, flickered and died, and Spock pursed his lips with a clockmaker's consternation.

"I should hasten to point out," Spock said quietly, though not really hastening at all, "that the Talosians will likely be aware of our intervention almost at once."

"Understood, Mr. Spock." He raised his phaser up to his shoulder, as if it were an ax waiting to come down with great finality.

"Here we are," the Vulcan said, into his tricorder.

And then, another keeper appeared, looking quite alarmed, inside that same glowing box of light. Carefully, its eyes swept around the huge machines, as if it was seeing two sets of surroundings at once: where it had been, and where it might be going next, mish-mashed together, and possibly the vague appearance of its own home world, too. Its eyes finally settled on Mr. Spock, and grew wide in horrible recognition and astonishment. Then, its mouth began to twist in anger.

"Now, Spock," Kirk said, as the Talosian seemed about to step toward them, full of grim resolve.

"I suggest you fire your phaser on stun, Captain," Spock said, in his most measured tone, turning again to the tricorder readings.

It took about a second for Kirk to click-down and fire. The tiny, top-heavy alien tumbled down after the "stun" blast, and the pink cube faded away.

"Well, that was easy," Kirk said, taking a breath and looking a little startled at this turn of events.

"I wonder if it should be allowed to regain consciousness," Spock said coolly, as though he'd already made up his mind on the subject.

"We could…" Kirk suggested, "send it off to some remote, mechanized mining facility."

"Their minds have been known to reach out beyond whole solar systems," Spock answered.

Kirk stepped past his friend and reached down to pick up the tiny alien body, in its silvery robe. He had that odd sensation of picking up a dead bug, suddenly aware of his own pulse pounding in his fingertips, with a vibrancy that could just as easily have been the creature's own pulse, thumping away again. He lifted it up and carried it around the corner, away from the zone of the pink cube. Then there was the sound of a full-power phaser blast, and Kirk came back, by himself.

"How is it going, Spock?" Kirk said quietly, trying to watch the equations on the tricorder screen over the other man's shoulder.

Then Spock's free hand came up and pinched Kirk's neck, and down he went. Except that, as soon as he hit the cool floor, Spock could see it was the frail little Talosian, revealed as if Spock had gone cross-eyed for a moment, then suddenly saw straight again. When he hurried back around to the far side of the machinery, where the phaser blast had sounded, he found James T. Kirk gasping for breath, and slowly turning from beet red, back to his normal flesh-tone complexion, now that the keeper was unconscious again.

"Not as easy as I thought," Kirk panted, as Spock locked arms with him, to help him up again.

"We may have to destroy the machine and evacuate as quickly as possible," the science officer sighed, as if imagining the fate of the entire galaxy, suddenly forced to burn it all down and head off for Andromeda, like Okies from the dust-bowl.

"Agreed." And, this time without remorse, Kirk fired his phaser at the unconscious Talosian. It turned to a shimmering silhouette of itself, for a second, and vanished entirely.

"What did the girl say," Kirk wondered, as Spock hurried to collect his last few readings, stepping closer to the gash near the top of the big tank-like device. "'They don't… mean to be evil?'" He shook his head, as if to get the last of his own strangled neck veins back into place again.

"If nothing else," Spock concluded, snapping shut the top of his tricorder, "their ambitions seem to have escalated, along with their revived technological capability."

"Nothing like the gallows of extinction, to sharpen the mind," Kirk nodded.

He stood back and began firing at the great metal way-station, and a moment later Spock was doing the same, both men standing a good four meters back, and backing up still farther, as the tank-like object glowed white, and slowly collapsed, melting downward and outward, giving off heat. When the entire machine was reduced to smoldering slag, they lowered their weapons. A dark smoke poured upward, toward the great domed cavern high overhead, blurring the rocky dome.

"Either way, the cat's out of the bag," the captain sighed, as they gave the melted remains one last look, and headed back to the elevator pad.

**Chapter Three**

Back in orbit, on the scout ship, Jim Kirk's boots clanged down the metal grate to where Spock was fiddling with a new glassy barrier on one of the cell doors along the gangway.

"All tucked in?" Kirk asked, unable to suppress a mischievous tone. Overhead, the warp engines emitted what seemed like an unusually fast thrumming sound, ululating through the hull. They were underway at last, putting more and more blessed distance between themselves and Talos IV, on the way to their next search for signs of invasion. General Hof was sleeping in a swaying hammock next door, and the mysterious octopus-like creature was floating in its familiar, impenetrable black water, behind the clear barrier.

Spock seemed about to answer, but then pondered before speaking, as he sat in "Indian style" before the make-shift aquarium. "I took the precaution," he began at last, "of installing a simple, binary environmental control, waterproof of course, for the cephalopod to adjust its climate to its own satisfaction. However," he added, with mild consternation, "its deep-water, high-pressure requirements seem to be considerably… beyond what I had anticipated."

Now the science officer reached past Kirk's boots to grab a high-energy welder, as his other hand scooped up a dark visor by his other knee. A moment later, he was reinforcing the barrier along the armored threshold with the brilliant light from the phaser torch, as Kirk stepped across to the opposite little cabin.

General Hof appeared to have snapped-out of his eternal reverie at last. He sat with his furry paws on his knees, on the hammock facing the corridor, looking as impatient and aggrieved as any healthy Tellarite should, under the same (improbable) circumstances. His round piggy eyes, and his fanged snout, quivered occasionally in what might be sheer disbelief. But maybe it was just the sound of the very fast engine overhead, or the intermittent sputtering of the plasma welding torch next door, that seemed to rile him.

"How're you doing, General?"

"Hmph!"

"May I come in?"

An uneasy pause followed, as the Tellarite appeared to recall the rules of real life, and the etiquette of refugees and starship captains, all of which seemed buried under some terrible weight of fantasy and embarrassment he still carried around, hundreds of trillions of miles removed from his old life.

"As you wish," Hof said and, though it sounded disdainful, Kirk knew it was probably the best he could hope for, as the Tellarite regained his sense of self.

"I'm… responsible for you, for the next days or… weeks," Kirk sighed as if he was, perhaps, a new father seeking advice. "And it seems to me… you need to pack-on at least fifty kilos of weight as soon as possible."

"Yes," Hof nodded, though from his downcast expression, Kirk imagined the Tellarite might be something like depressed, psychologically. And even the starship captain knew, from being a man, that Hof was also put in the embarrassing position of somehow trying to remember who he really was, after unknown decades of isolation and manipulation. And, whether that struggle back to himself would take the shape of some fearsome, clawed attack, or some wretched humiliation, or both, depended on something like the flip of a coin.

"Can you…" Kirk began, this time really needing advice, but also hating to prolong Hof's tenuous grip on self-control, "can you tell me what happened? To all the other captives?"

This is it, Kirk realized, suddenly wishing he hadn't asked at all. Hof's chest heaved as though his heart would break, and his head twisted in anguish, as if his throat was filled with jagged glass. But somehow, the Tellarite hung on to a shred of composure.

"There was—" then Hof stopped, and held out his hairy paws, as if he were trying to get a confusing barrage of sights and sensations straightened out in his mind, first. "I don't know. Something went wrong. They—the keepers—had finally run out of food, or medicine. They really didn't know anything except for their power of illusion," he said, with a little snort of contempt or resignation. It had taken over their lives, just as they had taken over our own, as their psychological slaves."

Kirk nodded, though he wasn't sure that Hof could see him, out of his peripheral vision. Their supplies, their life-lines, had collapsed, under quarantine. And just like Tarsus IV, where the young Kirk witnessed human slaughter, there mass starvation. Now, outside in the corridor, the welding torch continued its loud sputtering, as Spock double-sealed the aquarium.

"Out of sheer necessity, or the penury of their own creeping deprivation, or…" Hof paused again, as if he was trying to figure out the motives of the keepers, which were probably beyond any ken. "I think they could no longer bear the thought of losing all their fantasies, all the memories of all the travelers they'd captured through the years, of losing them to starvation. Of losing dreams of borrowed empires. It meant too much to them, though it was all… unreal. Yet it was the only reality any of us had."

"Of course," Kirk nodded again.

"They had to twist everything into new shapes," the Tellarite sighed, leaning back against the bunk wall. He stared far away, as if seeing through the ship, and past the passing stars, through another farther wall. "They had to… feed us on the meat of other captives who had died. They had to…" He lowered his head now, as if he were done talking.

"And they ran out of medicine?"

"Ha!" Hof exclaimed, as Kirk had finally understood some essential point, or as if the Tellarite were finally winning a hand of poker. Then, just as quickly, he turned very dark and glum again. "Many more died."

Kirk imagined, at least, that meant a renewed source of food, however ghoulish that must have been, assuming one wouldn't die from eating totally alien flesh. And, of course, it could be "imagined" to look and taste like anything you'd prefer. But the general was panting, as if in a sudden panic.

"They injected us with their own blood! Keeper's blood! As a medicine! It could have killed us all!" Hof said, in a cringing gasp. But, in his reduced state, only his quivering paws could come up, like some hammy old actor, in a moment of antique horror: held out before his face, and his yellowed fangs bared themselves in a grimace.

"Why would they do that," Kirk wondered, not even looking at the Tellarite now, as the idea of contamination returned to his mind, along with Admiral McCrae's withering disdain.

"How should I know!" Hof spat. "Perhaps the connection was breaking down—we were weakening, losing our physical strength, and could barely think straight anymore. And they were weakening, too! Perhaps they'd gone dream-blind. They knew the end was near. And yet still they hungered for our memories, almost in desperation, like a drug addict. We hungered for something they couldn't provide, when the food ran out. And they hungered for something we didn't have the strength to give. They must have thought their own blood, in our veins, would renew their ties to the dreamers."

Kirk realized he may have underestimated the general. And better understood the need to trick Captain Pike.

"I'll get you some dinner," the captain said, rising and walking to the door. He stopped, though, his hand on the thick metal frame.

"You didn't know Captain Pike," Kirk said, trying again. Hof stared blankly back. It was somehow incredible, as he would certainly have been the most famous person on Talos IV, at least in the eyes of Starfleet. "But what about Vina, his… female."

He didn't seem stagey or calculated, but Hof froze for an instant, as if he'd been blasted by liquid nitrogen on his lonely little hammock. Then his neck began to twitch uncontrollably, and his paws rolled into fists.

"She's mad! She wanted only killing!" His breath came faster and faster now, and his eyes squinted into slivers of terror and disdain. "She would have destroyed us all, without a second thought!"

Kirk gave a grim little nod and walked down the narrow, grated gangway thinking, '_I suppose that part might be true, at least from his point of view: judging from the immediacy of the reaction, and the strange blast scorching around the alien transporter_.'

Then, after he'd wedged himself past Spock, and stood at the food synthesizer, across from the transporter booth down the hall, the captain heard something like a steam explosion: a bang followed by a forceful, wet hissing noise. When he turned he saw the Vulcan, still trying to weld the high-pressure barrier onto the cephalopod's tank, except that one of those welds had burst right in front of him, probably from the shock of hot plasma welding against the increasingly frigid liquid behind the glass. The unflappable, squinting Vulcan was being sprayed by black water that darkened his tunic, as he put up his filtered eye-protection again, and fiercely renewed his construction project, amidst this latest indignation.

The keeper known as Aulbram touched the amulet on his chest again, with a kind of stunned insistence, as if the mechanism were some lazy servant that simply needed prodding. And yet, there was no pink cube and, apparently, no escape.

What frightened him most, though, was that Vina still looked beautiful, even to him. Shimmering blond hair, dewy eyes, glowing firm skin, and as hesitant as a newborn creature of the forest: it almost seemed the slightest rustling of the breeze might send her leaping back into seclusion like a young deer. But, Aulbram knew, he couldn't afford to see her that way. And that he _should_ be able to see through her vain illusion, as a master of his own specimens. But it hardly mattered now, as he'd lost track of her in the endless rush of so many humanoids and hortas and others in the crowd.

He tried to follow the usual pattern of her fantasies, of danger and rescue and combat and triumph and, from that, anticipate her next move. He wasn't finding her through the usual mental probing, there were far too many other thoughts pounding against his awareness, in the busy amusement park. He was standing, invisible to those around him, high up in the midst of the swaying skywalks above Wrigley's Pleasure Planet, about as far from Talos IV as one could get, at least in terms of surroundings.

And yet, in its own way, as similar as anything the human mind could develop, for pure escapism. But it was still merely wish-fulfillment to him, turned on its head: a million dream-seekers, coming and going every day, in calculated ordeals and risk-free duels with death, purely for entertainment, all supplied by just a handful of dreamers hunched over their psych computers, in the inner workings of the planet. Very much the opposite of when thousands of his kind would exult in the dreams of another captive species.

Aulbram was careful to hew to one side or another on the walkway, almost a mile up in mid-air, and hold to a flimsy pillar now and then as families rushed by, or young swains chased their intendeds on these giddy, outrageous, swaying ribbons in the sky.

Then it occurred to him that he'd seen flashes of this place before, in other human memories. He began scanning the ground far below for familiar sites. Here was where Captain Pike had vacationed as a boy, here was where one of his ensigns, from the _Enterprise_, had broken her collarbone getting out of a roller-coaster, decades ago, absurdly, after the ride had come to a full stop. He could still taste the child-like sensations like the remnants of a five course meal on his tongue. Children jostled behind him and, in a moment of wickedness, Aulbram enticed one of the little ones to shove his sister over the edge, out into thin air, plummeting downward toward her death.

Her high-pitched scream cut through the mindless roar of the pleasure-seekers, and then her mother started screaming, too. Then, as sure as sunrise, along came a big padded catcher's mitt the size of an aircar, perfectly matching the girl's falling speed, and getting under her before scooping her up, and wafting her back to her trembling parents, stunned; but safe and sound.

Then, like the lemmings of legend, more and more people began flinging themselves off into the air, from the relative safety of the writhing ribbon in the sky. Off, and off, and off they went, like bankers in a financial collapse, out ants from a picnic blanket shaken into the bright sunlight. Soon they were just dots, twisting and drifting down, down, down, till you couldn't hear their screaming and laughing anymore.

Robotic aircars zoomed this way and that, like predatory fish in some crowded lake, scooping up this little insect-like person, or that one, then tipping artfully to snag one more and then another, as the pleasure-seekers flew and flew and flew, with death-defying wildness, like parachutists without their silks.

And then Aulbram felt someone standing behind him. The aircars were getting crowded with laughing, shrieking visitors far below, as more and more people hurtled their bodies out into the careless sky. And when he turned, at last, there she was: smiling that perfect smile, her eyes as direct and clear as a pilot's.

But instead of the flimsy, silvery dress she'd tied together out of a blanket on Talos IV, she seemed to be wearing a series of small black triangular-shaped swatches: as if she were a giant who got tangled up, striding through the flags of a fleet of pirate ships, tangling and tying them up into a stringed bikini made of Jolly Roger's, under her arms and over the hips and just barely covering the essentials. Her own travel amulet hung around her waist, dangling against a honey-blond cloud of pubic hair, bisected by another triangle of black.

Now, the same little boy who'd pushed his sister off the sky walk stumbled, flailing backward into Aulbram, as if he'd been playfully pushed himself. And that, in turn, sent the keeper flying out into space, twisting and turning, his silvery robe flying up, then fluttering every which way like it would rip apart, as he pin-wheeled downward. Aircars were crisscrossing all around the falling Talosian, but the great catcher's mitts seemed completely overwhelmed by the sudden fad, the absolute mania, of plummeting like daredevils that took-over these everyday people from all over space. Three more here, were picked out of thin air, and six more there, or just in one's and two's. It was like a Victoria Falls of perfectly sentient beings, or chaff thrown up in the sun from a farmer's thresher: billowing out into nothingness, until the moment they were saved: simulated danger, for peaceful people.

You could see Aulbram plotting as he grew smaller and smaller below, tricking this pleasure-seeker and then that one to turn their arms like gliding wings, intersecting into his own path as they plunged and plunged and plunged: then a third, then a fourth, shrieking or laughing as they fell across the space just below him, their clothing snapping and ruffling continuously in the roar of the wild wind. Another, and then another nearly missed him, as he thought to tempt a new arrangement of skydivers to draw a robotic aircar to his rescue. And on the thin filament of walkway two thousand meters up, Vina smiled to see him squeezing his amulet for dear life.

She watched, becoming lost in her own artfulness; as she, too, rearranged the jumpers in mid-air, using their thoughts to glide them into pairs or triplets or even six-sided snow-flakes, to be caught up in synchronized groups, and whisked back to safety. As a trained mathematician, she was far more qualified to arrange these bodies in motion, telepathically, always at the greatest possible distances from her former captor, always confounding every attempt he made for his own rescue in the air. And a minute or so later she didn't see him at all. But the shrieks of unexpected delight all along the skywalk began jabbing into her ears like knitting needles, and she made her way to an ascension tower to take the more sensible route back down to the surface. Suddenly, it wasn't such fun anymore.

Then it hit her again, for the one hundredth time: she still didn't have her Chris. And no matter how many keepers she destroyed, she'd never get him back.

Instantly, though, her melancholy was replaced by a furious anger. Surely, the extinguishing of her triumph meant the keeper was still alive, somehow, and still attempting to re-program her own happiness into anguish, from far below. Even after his terrible fall, it seemed he could still plunge her into sadness on a whim; even after he realized (at last) that none of their amulets would work the way they should. It could not, of course, simply be her own grief catching up with her.

So she was on his trail again, zooming downward in one of the elevator capsules, in the nearest great stanchion in the sky. The tower doors whipped open, and she walked out with what seemed like a defiant swagger, her tiny black war flags fluttering on tie-lines from her waist and shoulders and breasts, though no one could actually see her, even in her beauty. Or, perhaps, on some level they could: as children and parents and everyone else went streaming out around her, without ever actually touching her, rushing off to the next pre-planned, death-defying experience. Perhaps, on some extreme low-level of the subconscious, or in their hysterical blindness, she passed among them, generating just a twinge of unexplained anxiety.

The only problem now was that there was no expert mathematician guiding the jumpers into convenient groups all across the sky and, if anything, they were jumping in even greater numbers into the emptiness, in the death-defying madness, and no way to stop them, either. And, more and more disorganized, two; and then four, and then six spiraling aircars began crashing in mid-air collisions, their wreckage plummeting into the park below. Fire and smoke climbing up from mid-air explosions.

A few bodies hit the earth like fallen angels, like flashes of lightning, as wonder and astonishment turned to horror. She walked on, knowing many more innocent beings had died in the tunnels of Talos IV, and many more would die if the keepers were not stopped soon. She scanned the horizon and the doors and windows of other dream-like, comical buildings, or floating exhibition halls, or anti-gravity water parks, for Aulbram. Each bit of undulating architecture, or improbable tower reminding her of how they'd forced her to become an artist of dreams, too, and a sculptress of fantasies, for years and years.

A smoldering smile spread across her pretty young face, and the sirens wailed in the background, and announcements were made over loudspeakers, as the ambulances arrived, and the fire of the wreckage burned here and there behind her.

She paused and searched with her mind for the blankness at the center of some as-yet undetected dream vortex, in the great mental landscape of this crowded planet: a blind-spot where Aulbram would be conspicuous for his own inability to dream, a null-space in a vibrant cacophony of wild, personal visions he might choose to feed on again. She sniffed the air with her mind, as people went running like chickens in circles of panic and amazement, or just stood, playing the incidents over and over in their own minds, as minds were wont to do. High above, the ascension tower was shut down at last. Now, if she could just look beyond this, into the keeper's refuge among them. All this horror over borrowed dreams was simply getting in the way.

_SEE THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE_, the sign ahead proclaimed. Dutifully, she wandered that way, even as security teams were clearing the park and med-evac crews were scraping the splattered bodies up from the fairgrounds on every side. So much blood and panic: when dreams come true.


	3. Chapters 4 and 5

**Chapter Four **

_"…Our fastest probes, and greatest minds, are rushing into the barrier—the barrier between everything we know, and everything that is un-knowable," _a dramatic voice half-whispered, as she walked through the dark, and looked up. It seemed that she was racing along too, in a great holographic projection all around, in some kind of domed building. She was quickly catching up with a robotic ship, in fact, floating overhead: its enormous warp engines and the tiny fuselage blurring and stretching like a permanent simulation of the time warp effect, itself. Then, as if by magic, the view inside the computerized planetarium shifted again, and she seemed to have passed that fastest possible ships, and plunged on even farther, even faster.

_"The first trans-radiant mechanics were beamed to the farthest reaches over twenty years ago, and they, in turn, beamed other ghostly instruments even farther, and on and on, till the last set of light-wave mechanics finally reach the end of everything, at any moment._

_"And what will we find? Is the greatest distance we can measure really the twenty-eight billion light years from one end to another; or could it be the incalculable distance between one utterly distinct consciousness and the next, bridging the invisible distance between any two people, who might be standing shoulder to shoulder?" _

No telepath would ever make that claim, she told herself sardonically, for now she knew how close all those universes of thought really were, in spite of all the barriers.

And all around her, the whole physical Universe seemed to spin around in one giant cat-in-the-air leap, and somehow a projection of her own face grew like a crystal ball overhead, like golden light curling up from below, and down from above, until only her blinking, blue, enigmatic eyes filled the sky (for her old Explorer's chip made her visible to automatic park sensors). And then that image of her eyes overhead split, even as she looked up, and a million galaxies spilled out of those twin blue hemispheres: like the dreams she used to own.

It went on like that for a while, with brilliant beams of exploded supernovae shooting off into space, and crashing in with explosive effect, out through one edge of the Universe, then magically appearing again from another edge of space, at a particular angle, as though the edge were really, somehow, the center. A nearly spherical, 20-sided grid appeared before her to attempt to explain the situation, like some vast, extravagant ball-like illustration of _karma_, where that supernova blast had poetically turned against her.

And then, as the dark walkway carried her forward, she turned around impatiently, reversing her course: back-tracking out into that hall of elementary theory, and finally looked up. Aulbram's giant head now loomed over her, big as the sky, peering downward, though she couldn't see his little figure anywhere else.

She supposed that keeper must still be alive, somehow, and that they were doomed to fight it out here on this amusement park planet, hastily evacuated, with only the blinding safety lights on as the sun was setting. They couldn't escape by their usual means, through Talos, with their amulets. The whole game had changed abruptly. And off in the distance, ground crews were plugging diagnostic computers into the smoking wreckage of the aircars to see if they'd simply failed to do their job of collecting the last of the jumpers, when some mass insanity seemed to have taken over too many visitors, or if some other factor was to blame. With no music, and no screaming children, the planet-wide amusement park seemed like a hideous, empty excess of salesmanship, a ghostly carnival that had taken over a whole world, though any sign of amusement had vanished, like a dream.

Wild, curving towers were frozen in dance-like poses overhead, in the distance, as the sun disappeared below the horizon. Several acres beyond that, pretend Klingon warships were parked like lonely passenger buses along a restful pond, with no great battles to re-enact tonight. It was all weirdly thin and colorless, without the usual flashing lights and clamoring crowds, or giant robots pretending to crush your little brother or sister, with giant mechanical feet. They had all gone stomping back to some hanger somewhere, to sleep for the night.

And then her eyes scanned back the other way, to where the unfortunate guests' bodies had been laid out and draped-over. But she felt that something wasn't quite right, and slowly approached the field of the dead, in neat rows like fallen soldiers. One, though, had been set up on a floating stretcher, and was about to be loaded on to an ambulance, whose flashing lights suddenly come to life, in sudden alarm: like a startled horse, over the nature of the body bag being slid inside, from behind.

She got there just before they closed the back of the ambulance, and froze the crew with a telepathic "fuzz-bomb." A momentary distraction would be all they remembered when she left the scene a few minutes later.

And when she peeled back the body bag flaps, there was Aulbram, looking as though he hadn't survived the long fall after all, not by a long shot. She reached down into the long black shroud, and found his own amulet shattered against his chest. The few bits she brought out in her hand seemed real enough.

With barely a thought, she signed Aulbram's forehead with the jagged pieces in her fingertips, making a slashing V-I-N-A back and forth that might never be understood, though she didn't really care, one way or another. She wrapped him again, and backed-out of the med-evac car with a sense of artistic completion. As she walked away she lifted the fuzz-bomb's misty presence, and the ambulance crew picked up in mid-sentence, just as if nothing had stalled their procedure.

Now she needed a ship. And her mind stretched out above like a search-light, scanning the minds of pilots in orbit, for just the right one.

"It appears," Spock said quietly, in the cockpit with the captain, "the cephalopod is making greater use of its binary control panel than I'd anticipated." He tapped a fingertip next to a lighted touch-pad, as if he were thinking of cutting off the direct connection between the environmental control and the two-button switch he'd installed in the aquarium.

"In what way?"

Spock readjusted himself in the big padded co-pilot's seat, with its wrap-around sides, as if he preferred the freedom of a smaller, simpler office-type chair on board the _Enterprise_. He let out a little exhalation of breath which, in a human, would have been a sigh: somewhere between concern and consternation.

"The binary switch was the origin of the computer, which evolved into highly sophisticated control mechanisms, before being replaced by so-called 'fuzzy-logic' circuits, and later super-positioning, which gradually, through a series of great inventions, evolved into what we now call Duotronics."

Now, it was Jim Kirk's turn to let out a little exasperated breath. Out ahead, the stars were still streaking by, as the ship made its way to what he only half-hoped would be their first off-world encounter with an escaped keeper.

"Beginning with an understanding of the environmental controls, through the simple on-off capabilities, the creature has progressed," Spock said, calling up a holographic image of what appeared to be a programming chart that floated above the control panel, "to exploring the inner-workings of the ship's main computer itself."

Kirk allowed himself a small moment of surprise.

"I think we've done everything we can, to make our guest feel comfortable, Mr. Spock."

"Agreed, Captain." And, with that, the science officer touched a light-pad, and the binary control switch was shut down, inside the tank.

Down the narrow passageway behind them, they could hear the Tellarite letting out a little cry of surprise. When Jim Kirk got down to the aquarium, next to General Hof's little cell, he had the same reaction. The tentacled creature was pressing itself up against the glass, writhing in apparent frustration—over the denial of computer privileges, he could only assume. An odd squishing noise accompanied the violent undulation of all those black arms, in the black water. The general stood outside his little cabin, looking to see if Kirk or Spock realized something was wrong, and then he turned back to the clear barrier, which seemed to be bowing and pressing outward, ominously, along with the creature's motions.

The creature's muscular curving and un-curving seemed to go in every direction at once. But this particular octopus-like being didn't have all those hundreds of suction cups, like its Earth counterpart. It was more like some huge, dark, super-evolved worm or slug, billions of years later.

"Maybe we could offer it a good book," the captain said, as Spock stood behind Hof to watch the angry display.

"Or a drink," Hof countered, more relaxed now, after his own good meal, and folding his arms as Dr. McCoy or Mr. Scott might have done, behind the two senior officers.

"Perhaps it has a legitimate use for the ship's computer," Spock said, even as Kirk and Hof still congratulated one another on their humorous insights.

"Can we keep it isolated, once it's gotten into the system?" the captain asked. He looked worried, reaching out to the Vulcan for his own particular kind of expertise. "I know it's a personal thing, but would you be able to answer its questions or show… some kind of cooperation, with a mind-meld?" Jim Kirk had now assumed a more thoughtful manner, over the inherent awkwardness of what he was suggesting. Especially considering the way the tentacles were writhing against the glass, with black water squishing this way and that, as each muscular appendage pressed harder or curled tighter against the glass, as if the creature were trying to tear it away and strangle them all in its fury.

"It's definitely trying to tell you something," Hof grunted, a conclusion that neither Starfleet officer could deny.

"Without intending any disrespect to the General," Spock began, "I would be… somewhat reluctant to mind-meld with a creature that had been… subjected to an unknown number of years of telepathic abuse."

"I understand," Kirk said, without a trace of recrimination. The whole idea of contamination, or even madness, had reared its head again. "Is there a way we can grant it… limited computer access?"

"It should be possible. I would begin by noting, however, that we, ourselves, seem only to have limited access, given Starfleet's secure pre-programming."

"That might be for the best. Let's re-open the link, starting with a route from the binary control into linguistics," Kirk said, and all three humanoids climbed up to the cockpit again. Once Spock was seated, and Kirk and Hof were looking over his shoulder as the scientist began: slowly at first, typing routing commands into the control panel. The holographic programming tree still hung in the air and, as Spock worked, different projected strands of computer pathways were illuminated or deleted, as he attempted to reconfigure the creature's environmental links to the main system.

"Now," he said, his hands still tapping out codes on the touch-pads, "I propose that we send through an elementary communication…" Then, as Kirk could read; and possibly Hof, too, Spock began typing a sort of elementary foreign-language classroom conversation: "Hello, my name is Spock. Your name?" And so on.

It sounds demeaning, but what came back would have to be spoken as something like, "hello, my name is _squishy-squishy-tok-tok_." But, of course, that was entirely lacking in nuance or context.

"I believe we can begin to speed things up," Spock said, reaching across his typing hand, and enabling the translator software, whereupon another section of control panel lit-up with colorful bars flashing this way and that, against the black polished surface. A gushing sound came through the overhead speakers, like respiration, and the sound of someone playing with the teeth of a pocket comb underwater, as if it were a miniature xylophone.

"This is Spock," he said, after a moment spent listening to the gushing and flushing, and to the mystical runs of clicking noises.

_"This is Krishtakonka,"_ it sounded, coming through the speakers, strangely similar to the gushing and clicking.

"Do you require medical assistance, or any other urgent care?"

There was a long pause, as if the octopus-like creature was still unraveling the translation, or as if perhaps there really was something seriously wrong.

_"Take me home."_

All three air-breathers looked out the cockpit windows for a brief moment, remembering once more that each was impossibly far from anything like home.

"We shall do so, as soon as our mission allows. Can you provide point-of-origin information?" Spock asked.

There followed a general description, a huge red giant, and the moons of a lone, surviving super-world, with heat and dim light coming from the mother planet, down to the ocean world below, a world that had somehow avoided going through its roaring atmosphere for billions of years. Finally, relative positions of constellations showed Krishtakonka's home to be almost half-way between Leo and Crater.

"Understood. May we forward any information to your people on your behalf?"

"Inform them," the squishy-sounding reply came, "that my offspring were all destroyed. I was captured by a race whose hearts are snares and nets. My captivity has been since approximately fifty annum ago," the cephalopod said, through the translating computers. Her story led to another moment of silence.

"We will transmit your message at once, though the confidential nature of our mission may require substantial encoding and re-routing."

"A few more delays will be of no consequence," Krishtakonka's computer-translated voice replied with a flatness that only emphasized her resignation, after waiting so long. Finally, Mr. Spock spoke again.

"Are you able to metabolize carbon-based proteins, and do you require that, or some other sustenance at this time?"

"Carbon-based protein: yes," came the answer, plain and simple with, perhaps, a flourish of one more respiratory flushing. One by one, the three males squeezed down the gangway again, making surprisingly little noise on the grated deck, as if chastened by these alien revelations.

What looked like a shoal of minnows soon appeared in a bucket in the transporter chamber, which could produce much greater quantities of synthesized food than their little galley, using the same memory banks. Soon, all those silvery little bodies were poured quietly into a heavy little air duct above the makeshift aquarium. They did not hear from Krishtakonka for the rest of the day.

It was becoming more natural for General Hof to stand behind Kirk and Spock up in the cockpit as the day progressed, perhaps out of boredom, or some private excitement at being out in space again, at long last. It was hard to tell, through the mask of fur. In any case, their ship seemed to have made the last of its latest warp-drive course corrections, if the engineering readouts were any indication.

"Ah," Hof said, in another moment of surprise. Kirk and Spock, who'd been studying the control board and the workings it revealed, both looked up. The cockpit windows had gone utterly black, as if they'd suddenly passed into the faraway "big freeze" stage of the Universe, many billions of years in the future, when everything would be spread so far apart that they were, effectively, in the middle of nowhere.

"Malfunction?" Kirk asked, as both men reached for sensor and display sub-routing, to regain the forward view.

"It seems unlikely," Spock said. But nothing they did to the blinking lights at their fingertips seemed to revive the streaking galaxy before them.

"Perhaps we're dead," Hof said, philosophically.

"It could be some kind of advanced cloaking device," Kirk said, not really feeling any smarter.

"But," Spock said, making a steeple of his fingertips just ahead of his lips, "cloaking against ourselves?"

Kirk fully turned to face the Vulcan, his own amazement dueling with a commander's sense of impatience. After a moment, he realized what Spock meant: that the less they knew about their next destination, the less likely they were to tip-off their mind-reading adversaries. They were, indeed, cloaked against themselves.

"But the ship is only following your map, from the pink cube," Kirk countered, after the uncomfortable moment had passed.

"I have attempted to 'skirt' my own awareness of our planned route," Spock nodded, his eyes scanning the long panel of blinking lights, "by randomizing the locations found in the Talos IV transporter device, first in my tricorder, and then by instructing the computer here to randomize again. The ship's own pre-programming, has provided an extra layer of protection."

"Assuming you didn't just _think _you were randomizing," Hof harrumphed, behind them.

"Indeed, General," Spock nodded, suddenly intrigued, with something like intellectual amusement. "However, I have also attempted to further introduce an 'element of surprise' in the selection process, by running through a series of psycho-graphic computer games and simulations, in effect 'teaching it' of my own expectations in gamesmanship."

"Gamesmanship!" Hof exclaimed, deeply offended, as if all of this had been reduced to something trivial—as if self-determination, or freedom itself, was some kind of quaint notion they could all just as easily do without. He was shocked at the way they took their freedom for granted, but his attitude of confrontation seemed strangely familiar to the two _Enterprise _commanders. It was almost like having Dr. McCoy standing there, shaking his head and beseeching the heavens for the power of endurance, though he was far away now.

"Gamesmanship, as it pertains to my own usual strategies and selection process," Spock explained, without a trace of guile or defensiveness. "In the event that my own judgment would to become impaired, the computer could then compare my base-line strategies with any new change in behavior."

"I'm sure he didn't intend to minimize your suffering on Talos, General," Kirk said, with the usual shrug of humility.

"Suffering!" Their opinions of themselves, and of him, were becoming insupportable, as if all of this was just a game, and he some ridiculous, self-indulgent victim, who sat in a corner weeping from his jowls for the last thirty or forty or fifty years. It was impossible to know how long, when it was all spent in dreams. The Tellarite began to shift and jerk as if he were trying to suppress some angry convulsion.

"On the other hand," Kirk said, trying to change the subject, "if you, yourself, suddenly _realized_ you had already been… contaminated, when you made the initial safeguards, you'd just have to change your behavior that much faster, to break free. And _that _would trigger a computer intervention, to protect you—and us—from the apparent change back to your usual strategies! When you were actually just self-correcting! And then the computer would restore you to your deluded state!" Kirk shook his head, as if it all made him dizzy. "Hopefully, though, not back into the hands of the keepers!"

"Indeed," Spock began, genuinely intrigued. He seemed to find the whole puzzle, and the captain's grasp of it, quite endearing.

"You are both ridiculous!" the piggy-snouted alien declared, and stomped back down the gangway, thinking them both quite mad already.

It was a beautiful afternoon on what appeared to be Saldana II, judging from the sun and the sky, which were both a nearly purple shade of blue when they beamed down. Spock nodded, in satisfaction at how the ship's computer had guided them to their destination. There were at least four other worlds that were closer to Talos, making this call truly unexpected. He began examining his tricorder, as Jim Kirk turned around to take in the breath-taking sweep of the landscape. General Hof remained up in orbit, on the ship.

Down below, abrupt gray cliffs soared skyward, in the north, a few miles from the capitol city. And white waterfalls hissed over their edges from a distant white-peaked mountain range, and the whole countryside was made into a green patchwork by rivers and streams.

A glinting white space elevator rose up much farther still on the other side of the town, high into the southern sky, where the harvest could be swept up into orbiting freighters. As a flock of white clouds raced by, the needle-like tower sliced through many of them: turning the hemisphere below into a giant sundial.

"Why would they come here," Kirk sighed quietly, as they approached the town, crossing a series of quaint stone bridges over streams at the corners of great green fields. "It's not exactly over-flowing with potential victims."

"Unknown," Spock replied.

"Can you… detect any presence?" The captain restrained the impulse to look back over his shoulder, as if someone might be lurking nearby, watching in the open, sunny field. Combined with the dazzling beauty of the waterfalls in the sunlight, along those dramatic cliffs, and the brilliant farm landscape, the added possibility of a secretive invader put excitement in the air—at least for Jim Kirk.

"No detection yet." He wasn't using his tricorder.

"Over there," Kirk nodded, seeing a group of townspeople coming out to meet them, from the main street. Spock continued looking all around, as if he were seeing right through them. There seemed to be only about ten or twelve of them, hardy people in jumpsuits, almost hurrying out to see the two Starfleet officers.

"Let's go," the captain said quietly and, after a minute or two, they reached the approaching colonists. And no sooner did the two men identify themselves than they were hoisted up on the shoulders of the largest men in the group, amidst raised fists in the air, like some old poster of revolutionaries, and carried back to the town like heroes. Though any "hero worship" seemed a little premature.

Still, Jim Kirk could not bring himself to interrupt this little impromptu parade, and he jounced along, just enjoying the ride, hoping the crowd wouldn't suddenly change its collective mind and dump them into a rushing stream along the way. Mr. Spock, predictably, seemed utterly bemused: his hands resting on the farmers' shoulders, jostling along in the air like a conquering warrior.

Finally they were set down, like sinewy cats, on the main street of the colonial outpost. A little bald-headed gentleman popped out of one of the clapboard-looking buildings and raised his arms in a sort of silent benediction over the assemblage.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he began, and a kind of grinning ceremonial audience took shape, out of the farmhands and technicians in the afternoon sun. "As we have expected, reassuring help has arrived at last."

"Thank you," Jim Kirk said, stepping forward, and the little fellow pumped his arm up and down, holding the captain's hand tight for a minute, as if this chief Saldanan might have wild, bucking mustang.

"I know we all have many questions for these brave men," the official said, removing one hand from his grasp of the captain's, and holding it in the air as a polite little shield. "But I'm sure they're both quite exhausted—"

"I assure you, sir, we are not—" Spock attempted to intervene, but something stopped him, perhaps a cautious look from his captain. It was only then the Vulcan noticed they were surrounded by some taut, grinning kind of panic that none of them seemed willing to address openly.

"Quite exhausted, quite exhausted," the official nodded, grabbing the lanky Vulcan by the elbow and drawing the two men in with him, into a quaint-looking building, designed to appeal to the frontier spirit of earthmen all around the galaxy, on similar colonial worlds.

Jim Kirk was suddenly spun inside, and Spock behind him, looking around at the familiar trappings: wooden-type chairs, a charming little pendulum clock on the wood-plank style wall, and red gingham curtains tied back on the windows facing the quiet street. But now the little man was closing those curtains, hurrying around the room as if battening down for a storm. When he passed a little wall shelf of figurines and toy-sized planets and spaceships arranged like valuable keepsakes, Jim Kirk couldn't help thinking their host was leaving all his little collectables, all those Saturn's and Betelgeuse's to face some coming danger on their own, while he bustled down to a root cellar for safety.

"I wonder if I might offer you gentlemen a drink," he said, looking more and more as if he might need one himself.

"No, thanks," Kirk said, offering him a smile, as they took the offered seats. Glancing at his first officer, Kirk wasn't sure if Spock knew what was coming next, or not. The captain was politely mystified, either way.

Now the little man sat as well, behind an unassuming little desk.

"Oh, dear, please allow me to introduce myself," he said, gathering his wits as best he could. "I am Mayor Holdenreid, Josiah Holdenreid, and welcome to Saldana, Saldana II, of course." He wasn't calming down at all, Kirk realized—he began to seem more like a train that had just slowed down for a moment, for a mail-bag hanging along the tracks. Now he was rattling on unstoppably again.

"It isn't often we get a starship captain in these parts—we're just one little world between a bunch of bigger, more crowded ones! I suppose they're our security, most of the time. Isn't it odd, though? Isn't it funny? I mean, funny isn't a good word, but here we are—everyone assumes we're in danger now _because _of our proximity to the great worlds! Ha!" The mayor barely paused for a breath.

"Mr. Mayor," Spock said, nodding out of politeness, "I'm sure I speak for the captain as well when I say we would not be offended at all if _you _were to enjoy a small libation, in our stead."

Mayor Holdenreid seemed to have to run that through his own internal translator, but then nodded quickly and his hands shook as he poured clear vodka from a bottle into a plain little glass on his desk.

One or two farmers tried to peek in over the closed curtains as they passed by, but any panic or concern seemed to be confined, entirely, inside of the mayor's office. The little clock on the wall ticked quietly as he drank, and set down the empty tumbler once more.

"That was… quite a reception out there," Kirk said, using his best backstage confidentiality, recalling their heroes' welcome in the fields.

Again, the mayor looked as if he'd been caught with his pants down, and then recovered himself somewhat.

"Oh, yes, well you'll have to excuse us, we're all just a little… concerned," he said, exhibiting a keen grasp of the obvious.

"And why is that?"

The mayor's eyes grew wide, as if he had woken up from a nightmare, only to find the nightmare still played on.

"Oh, well, it's—well, I'm sure you've heard—"

The two _Enterprise _commanders simply waited, as the halting phrase hung in the air, and the ticking clock seemed like the wary footstep of a passing guard.

"It's—something's—wrong," the mayor said, very quietly and urgently, at last.

"Go on," Kirk said, growing mildly frustrated.

"It's as if—" the mayor was flushed suddenly, and began pouring himself another drink. His voice became very quiet and confidential now, as if someone outside might be listening. "Well, before a war, you know how everyone seems to have… an _idea _about himself?"

"An idea?" Spock said, without any appearance of frustration at all, though perhaps a scientific air of puzzlement. His dark eyes blinked with a much slower rhythm, as regular as the beat of the clock.

"Yes," Holdenreid insisted, choking down another swig of alcohol, too quickly. In spite of himself, Jim Kirk felt as if he were swallowing a dry, warm stone as the mayor set the glass down again.

"You're too late," the mayor whispered at last, his eyes opening wide, as he looked back and forth at the two Starfleet officers.

Not wanting to jump to any conclusions, Kirk and Spock merely stared back. It seemed cruel, in a way, and Mr. Holdenreid's eyes welled-up with worried tears, as he pushed the glass and the bottle away, and made a great show of fastidiously setting back to work, re-stacking a pile of memory plaques on his desk, around a little desktop computer, and rubbing his forehead, and checking his subspace mail.

"When you say that everyone has an 'idea about themselves,'" Kirk said, going back a bit.

"Yes!" Holdenreid, nodded furiously, as if a kind of unknown, but unmistakable madness had gripped his world, and no one but he could see it.

"Have you conducted any psychological experiments," Spock asked, helpfully, "to determine a variance from the colonists' baseline profiles?"

"I started, but then realized it would be too obvious," Mayor Holdenreid half-smiled, holding up a scholarly finger in the air, as the vodka began to steady him. "Much too obvious, Commander. They would know I was on to them, as surely as you're sitting there," he added, as if planning his next gambit in a game of bridge, though his momentary flash of confidence quickly waned. His eyes wandered a bit, but then snapped back, as if to make sure Spock really was still seated across from him.

Farmer's caps bobbed along outside the windows, and the occasional ground vehicle lumbered by with seed or fertilizer, under the violet sky.

"We've been out," Kirk began again, trying another tack, "on the frontier, among the new worlds so long, we don't always know what's current here in the middle of things."

Now Holdenreid seemed to grow impatient with them both, as if they were lazy policemen, and the robbers were sneaking away while they stood there watching. His look darkened, his manner became much more careful and withdrawn.

"I'm a very busy man," the mayor said, though he had just managed to organize and clear-up his entire desk. Then he just stared down at the blank desk-top, seeming to make some very grim personal decision. And he stood, his chair squeaking against the plank-style flooring. Kirk and Spock stood as well. Suddenly, Mr. Holdenreid had the look of a public speaker trying to concentrate on his next oration, staring off at some unseen throng, in a corner of the room.

"You said," Kirk tried again, "before a war. What did you mean by that?"

"Everyone knows," Holdenreid whispered, impatiently, as he brushed around his desk and reached for the doorknob, to show the two men out.

"Everybody knows… what?" Kirk asked, not moving from the middle of the office.

There was another horrible silence, the kind you'd expect before a phaser shoot-out, which seemed terribly appropriate as the quaint, Western-looking town lay just outside the door.

"About the invasion," Holdenreid hissed, abruptly, with a penetrating significance, as if he were speaking to some newly discovered, non-carbon-based life-form.

"We're here to stop it," Kirk said, allowing that much to come out, but no more.

But that was enough, and Holdenreid's icy reserve melted in an instant. He looked as if he'd been in some long, aching pain, and had finally gotten a hypo to wipe it away. He stood up straighter, and he seemed to peer at Kirk now, as if he were some long lost brother, approaching through the heavy mist of battle. He heaved a deep, nearly silent sigh.

Then, with an almost theatrical timing, a rumble of thunder rolled across the valley outside, and Kirk and Holdenreid both glanced out at the sky, which had been more or less clear ten minutes ago.

"We are not at liberty to discuss all the details of the matter, sir," Spock said, "but we would be very interested in knowing what may have transpired here, along the same lines."

"Well," Holdenreid said, seeming to breathe at last, and returning to his swivel chair behind the desk, and finally Kirk and Spock sat down again, too. The mayor ran the heels of his hands over his nearly bare pate. "Everyone's heard the reports from Rigel, and Wrigley's and others. And of course we're all a little on-edge, as that's all in this same general region, or along the same general space-lanes, I should say."

"Go on," Kirk said, wondering if Spock might have made a miscalculation in his study of the pink box on Talos, and sent them to the wrong planet.

"People," Holdenreid said quietly, leaning toward them, "have been having visions."

This was most unexpected, and Kirk focused his concentration on the mayor anew, waiting. Another ominous roll of thunder stomped down the main street, and the sky had grown darker till it seemed to merge with the tops of the gray cliffs out beyond the outpost, in the distance. The waterfalls had become like the multiple legs of some approaching storm. The mayor began looking through his desktop files, with a sense of renewed confidence. He brightened, enthusiastically, when he found the screen he was looking for.

"One man said he thought his wife was in a coma, when he got in from the fields. She was just sitting there, rocking back and forth for hours and hours, totally unaware of anything. And when she woke up, she said she'd been lost in a memory she'd completely forgotten! For hours!"

"And you think that may have something to do with…"

"There's more," Holdenreid insisted. "People crying uncontrollably, and going into rages, and thrashing around, destroying anything in their reach."

"A kind of self-absorption," Kirk suggested, though he knew it wasn't going to be helpful in making the mayor's case for him. Although the idea of a woman, just sitting for hours in a rocker, did remind him of Chris Pike in his final days.

"That's what I thought, at first! And then, it was all people could talk about—how this had happened to them, or that, and how they'd become obsessed with something, to the exclusion of all else. Hours and days, just lost. Obsessed with some wrong thing that had happened to them ages ago! When their psych profiles had been perfectly well balanced before they shipped out."

Kirk nodded, knowing moving out across hundreds or thousands of light years could produce some very strange results in people, who never gave a thought at all to their old home planets till they'd left everything else behind. People who didn't have a built-in community to take with them, like a hermit crab's borrowed shell, and who certainly couldn't hurry back to a Starbase whenever the need arose; people who were really, seriously on their own.

"And this seems… parallel, to you," the captain said, "to a kind of heightened 'clan,' or narcissistic behavior, on an individual level?" Everyone knew about that kind of thinking, but it seemed to have been entirely ironed-out of modern humanoids in the 23rd Century, amidst the topless riches of the galaxy. Men were no longer tied down by the hypnotic lure of glowing screens, or exhorted by electrical impulses, for what seemed like pleasure, to make them bow down to something outside, or even something buried deep within, themselves.

"Look at this," Holdenreid said, turning the glowing desk-top computer toward them with one hand, and examining a couple of memory plaques with the other, before popping one into the port. The little screen came to life with a linear graph, and curving lines tangling across the grid. Both _Enterprise _men leaned forward.

"Psychiatric evaluations of five different colonists who'd all had some kind of dream-rage or memory fixation, when they'd had none to speak of, before." He wiggled his finger along the section of the screen where the individuals all seemed to have reached some heightened level of… something.

"That's where it gets interesting," Holdenreid said, watching Kirk and Spock decipher the graph.

"The inversion level," Spock said, quietly.

"Exactly."

"I don't understand," Kirk said, finding some unknown reserve of patience within himself.

"At some point, during the last month," the mayor explained, an eerie scientific delight coming into his manner, in spite of his unsettling discovery, "their _inner _lives became much more vivid to them, than their _outer _lives. It's as if something was gradually, completely turning them inward, without regard to the world around them. The way a hostile nation loses regard for its neighbors—"

"Before they go to war," Kirk said, and the mayor nodded, suddenly leaning back, triumphant. Kirk's own expression was far from that.

Light rain began tapping in clear streaks against the windows now, and spattered along the street.

"Of course, you'll have to excuse me," the mayor added, still smiling but shaking his head, in observance of Kirk's furrowed brow. "But that was my doctoral thesis, before the Federation psych board appointed me as colonial mayor."

"Do you mind if we meet with any of these people?" Kirk asked, without sharing any of the mayor's enthusiasm.

"I don't mind," he shrugged, "but just be aware that a lot of us are getting very concerned. And you don't want to shake them up too much," he added, as if he were already the chief, and an entire staff of one, in a very busy psych ward.

Now all three stood up again, but the rain was really beginning to pour down, and colonists were hurrying this way and that to get indoors. The thunder had become almost constant, and the windows shook like fragile glass drums. Holdenreid gave them a copy of his study, on a blue memory plaque, and Spock quickly navigated through it on his tricorder till he found the names and addresses of the townsfolk.

"That first woman is all the way down at the end of the street, two farms down, on this side," Holdenreid nodded, as Spock stepped outside, still reading the little screen in his hand, and Kirk followed.

"Come on, Spock," Kirk said, as he passed the Vulcan, and hurried from one main street awning to the next, on the raised wood-like sidewalk. But when the captain turned back, he saw the Vulcan watching him, guardedly, from between the buildings, and quickly becoming drenched.

"Don't tell me I have a science officer who doesn't know enough to come in out of the rain," he smiled, over the loud hiss of the hundreds of thousands of raindrops. He stepped toward Spock, holding one golden arm over his forehead, as he was pelted between awnings. His tunic grew spotted and then just plain wet.

The Vulcan eyed him with what could only be called deep suspicion. Still, water raced down through his own dark hair, and along his temples, and even from the tip of his hawk-like nose, and into his open tricorder, as the street had finally emptied of all other foot traffic. A big delivery truck hummed by, splashing along as it passed.

"It is _not _raining," Spock declared evenly, his eyes burrowing into Kirk's from a meter away.

And yet, great gullies of water were rushing along the curbs, and pouring down off the awnings and spraying off the overhangs like the cliff-side waterfalls themselves. Another bolt of lightning cracked overhead, almost seeming to twine down from the space elevator itself, towering into the dark clouds.

**Chapter Five **

Imaginary or no, they stood in puddles just inside a farmer's doorway, several blocks later.

"Vulcan confidence makes for a poor umbrella," Jim Kirk smiled, but only to himself: knowing the joke wouldn't even be funny when it reached his own ears, let alone his fellow officer's. Vulcan certitude had saved Kirk's own life on more than one occasion. Now it just left him feeling like a fool: a fool with cold, wet feet.

"She's in there," the husband remarked, not quite sure what to make of the two visitors, but leading them through a modest living room to a darkened bedroom. It seemed obvious he'd been spending his nights on a reclining easy-chair in that front room, where a pillow and blanket were shoved against the back crack. He was a big, serious man, waving them briefly into the dark room. But he remained outside the bedroom, his expression more like a barren field of wrinkles and furrows than a mutable canvas for emotions.

It was hard to pick her out of the shadows, initially. There were feminine draperies and lace sheers on the windows, and fabricated heavy blond wood furniture: a sturdy bed, a woman's vanity table with a big round mirror, and a chest of drawers, all standing back from the rug that lay beneath the bed. The room smelled like old-house, like the steady and sure, thousand-year burning process of wood oxidizing, wearing away, till the day came when it would all come crashing down. And there in the corner, in her bedclothes, was the farmer's wife in a very plain little rocking chair. She didn't seem to notice them.

"Doc says there's nothing wrong," the farmer intoned, barely moving his lips, looking away as if the illness were an embarrassment. Up till a few hundred years before, it would have been perfectly natural to have one or more members of the family in some unfathomable, lingering, bedridden state. But now, for colonists, the most likely cause always seemed to be something unearthly, in every sense of the word. Moving out to the frontier always seemed to mean a loss of the modern, or the sure, or the kind.

Jim Kirk watched the farmer's wife, almost motionless, except for the faint rocking back and forth, eyes barely focused toward the silvery light of the rain outside.

Kirk glanced at his first officer, again wondering if Spock could bring himself to mind-meld with someone so obviously… contaminated.

"Mrs. Vedder," the captain said quietly, looking boyish and deferential with his hands folded across the front of his trousers, his head bowed slightly. She only stared ahead in her rocking chair, as the world oscillated back and forth in the reflection in her eyes: like the view from a pendulum, and completely oblivious to him.

"Do you mind if I sit with you?" he asked, and it was probably his imagination, but her expression seemed to soften, very slightly. The edge of the thick bed sank under his weight.

He watched, and wondered: she wasn't young anymore, and here she was on a colony not more than twenty years old. She must have known of the work, even with the usual robotic conveniences, and that the challenges that would push her into old age much faster. And yet, soft light sifted through the dimmed windows, and he could easily imagine her twenty years ago, riding a horse, or chasing children through a backyard garden. Just as his own mother had done, years before that.

He began talking to her about that, and Iowa, and how he missed the Earth, now and then—the sort of small talk he'd make at a party or between conferences, or stuck together in a shuttlecraft between crowded vessels and some busy space-port. It didn't seem to make any difference: she had simply disappeared, somehow, into herself.

Finally he just had to give up, and get up. They had several more of these broken people to see, and just watching the farmer's wife as he poured out his heart and his life to her, and just seeing it all disappear down into the nothingness of her blank expression, was giving him a headache.

Suddenly, when he started off again, a worn, claw-like hand had tangled itself in the side of his green tunic, like the branch of a dead bush. He turned back to see Mrs. Vedder had stopped rocking, and was peering intently up at him, between her bed and the soft glow of the lace curtains.

"I was afraid you didn't feel like talking," he said, falling back into his usual mode of flirtation.

"The darkness gives up its dead, but only for a moment," she said, as if they were spies of old, passing on a train platform and, like her husband, her lips barely moved. "The candles reach out, but they have no hands," she muttered, through a strange little scowl, as though she were the only woman of a certain age who actually disapproved of soft candlelight. Her eyes glowed in that moment, focused up toward his forehead, as if her mysterious words were going directly into his brain. Then, the spies had passed, or the train whistle had blown, and she was gone again.

He waited to see if anything else would vibrate out, through the fog that came back to shroud her mind. But after a few moments, she just began to rock back and forth again, as if it had never happened. Gingerly, he lifted each of her fingers out of her fist, and his shirt snapped back against his waistband. It hurt his heart, but he thought of his mother as he put her hand back on top of the other one, in her lap. He imagined she'd just stay like that until her husband put her in her bed again that night.

"Thank you," he said quietly, to the farmer, as they stepped out toward the living room . Mr. Vedder said nothing, but hung back, against the bedroom door frame for a minute, looking past it to the other end of a dark hallway, as if permanently trapped there.

When the two commanders stepped back out onto the road, they could see they were the only ones who'd ventured out since the storm. Dark gray clouds still raced overhead, and every glimpse of the very top of the far white space elevator vanished before Jim Kirk could even count the thousands of meters he'd glimpsed so briefly.

The occasional patch of violet sky was streaked with green light in the nearly hidden sunset. On Earth, that would be an ominous sign, green with dark storm clouds mixed together. But, who knew what the colors meant all the way out here? Did the same old warning signs just keep following earth-men through the galaxy?

They walked up the road, back toward the mayor's office. Spock read his tricorder, and Kirk read the numbers on the small buildings, looking for the next of the remaining-disappeared, or whatever they'd be called, if it became a more generalized phenomenon. In the meantime, you could almost hear the rain evaporating, and feel the air blooming with moisture. If there was any rain.

"Mrs. Jane Elaine Vedder," Spock read, from the tiny screen, concerning the woman they'd just seen. "maiden-name Turpin. Microbiology, self-taught, Colonial-board certified, age 53 Earth years, no significant history of addiction, no psychoses, no significant—"

"Here we are," Kirk said quietly, tapping the Vulcan on the forearm to stop him, as they arrived at the next stop. All around a lonely farm house, invisible wind raced across the contours of the land, brushing the glossy wheat toward a silvery gray, except for the odd bit of sunset that flashed from the horizon: a startling glimpse of golden light, restoring isolated patches of color here and there.

"Hello," the captain said quietly, knocking on the frame of the screen door, like a conventional farm house back on Earth, or some ceremonial observance of it. The whole colony had simply gone to sleep, feeling the steady wind, as if it was the weight of all silence. Nobody home, he thought. He couldn't see inside very well, into the shadows. There was a pause.

"Bzzt! You're dead, you're dead!" a boy's voice shouted, and there was a familiar-seeming raised little arm in silhouette, and a melodramatic flailing onto a couch.

"Oh, Daniel," a woman's voice said, and there was the clattering of ceramic bowls and wooden spoons, farther in. "See who it is."

"Who is it," a little boy said flatly, not getting up from the fresh grave of the couch.

"Captain James T. Kirk, of the Starship _Enterprise_," he said, politely, out on the stoop.

"It's Rob," the little boy concluded, without getting up. You could see the toy phaser bobbling dangerously toward the front door again, over the back of the couch, the child's toy pointing around in a lazy circle of the room: the family portraits held hostage by the newest generation.

"It is not Rob! Don't be silly," the woman said, coming out of the kitchen now. But when they could just see her, and when she could just see them, in the shadow on the porch, she stopped.

"No," she said, quietly but emphatically.

"Ma'am," Kirk began again, "I'm Captain James T.—"

"No!" she cried out, and rushed forward to slam the solid, the heavy inner door against the screen door, though they caught a glimpse of a woman who looked as if she were about to go running for a fire extinguisher; or a shotgun to kill a snake or a wolf. Then they could hear the electronic lock on the door, and then Daniel, inside, let out a yelp, as if he'd been grabbed by his shooting arm. Then they could hear the woman crying inside, and the boy asking, demanding, "what, what?"

"Ma'am," Kirk said, loud enough to be heard through the locked door, "we're here to investigate something. A possible invasion. It's nothing to do with you, or with anyone in your family. There's no reason to fear!" Then he looked back at Spock, as if to apologize for an inexcusable overstatement.

Then, after what seemed like a full minute, the lock went _zing! _And the door opened slowly, as the boy stood scowling up at them.

"What invasion," Daniel demanded, his curiosity beginning to get the better of him. Then, he was yanked away, back into the darkness, toy phaser and all.

"I'm—uh—I'm so sorry," the woman said, appearing in the slightly wider crack in the door, behind the screen door, her reddish-brown hair still barely curled, but with no particular makeup on, and suddenly preoccupied with drying her hands on her apron. "I just thought you were here about Robert, is all." Her voice went up, as she spoke, as if it were a matter of delicate defiance, against some unknown enemy, or against her own worst fears. Finally, she looked up at Kirk, and then at Spock, steadying herself, as if they might have been the bearers of unhappy news from Starfleet.

"No, ma'am, I apologize, it's nothing like that," Kirk said, at once trying to be pleasant, and yet still struck by the awkwardness of their coming together.

"Well, I guess you'd better come in out of the rain," she sighed, holding the door as Mr. Vedder had done.

"It's stopped," Kirk said, self-conscious that his first officer would sure not approve of such mental laxity, as the Vulcan followed them both into the front room. No wonder Daniel was playing on the couch, the floors looked as if they'd all just been polished, and the tassels on the oval-shaped area rug radiated outward, like a perfect oval sun.

"Go play in your room," the woman said, as if the two men wouldn't hear.

"Are you a Vulcan?" Daniel asked, wanting to know the precise nature of his visitors.

"Half," Spock answered. Daniel hadn't expected this reply, this variation on so obvious a truth, so he walked down the hall to his room, going slower and slower.

"Invasion, oh my," the woman said, as if receiving some bad news, but not really. Not really as bad as what she'd thought at first, anyway. Now it was more like someone else's misfortune.

"I'm sorry we put such a scare into you," Kirk said, falling into the old country pattern of speech.

"Oh, you have no idea!" she pretended to laugh a little, and finally gave a nod to a holograph on a little side table, of a young man with one of those terribly dangerous little gyrocopters out in a field, looking very proud. He was pretending to climb inside while the camera recorded him. He waved, and the hologram looped back to the beginning again, as Robert led the photographer closer to the contraption again, out in the stubby remains of the wheat, the picture of a backyard explorer.

"He built that," she said, apparently for the one thousandth time, because Kirk thought he could hear Daniel, down the hall repeating the next words along with her, from behind his bedroom door: "the summer before he left for Academy."

"What's he doing now?" Kirk leaned forward, to distract from the formal posture of his first officer. In an hour, or less, he'd probably never see her again. But for now, she was the only person in the world.

"Well," she said, her voice cringing upward in a slight tone of protest, "he was _supposed _to be out along the Neutral Zone, you know. Well, of course, _you _know," she laughed more spontaneously now. "On the _Ticonderoga_? Do you know the _Ticonderoga_?" she asked, both politely and a little fearfully, as if he might know a lot more than she did. She pronounced every little syllable of the name, as if it were strange and foreign to her.

"She's a good ship," Kirk said. And, for Robert Stamfield to end up on a starship was quite a coup for his whole family.

"Well," she said, gathering her information, like snap peas in the front of her apron, "he was _supposed _to be out there, but now he's not! And they won't tell me where he went! I mean, where he's on duty," she said, trying to put things in a more formal frame, so as not to sound ignorant or disrespectful.

He wanted to turn and talk about this new information with his first officer, but there wasn't much to be said, other than: well, something was up, bigger than the Neutral Zone, somehow, and starships were on the move.

"They've reassigned his ship?" he asked, at last, having re-formulated his question.

"Well, as near as I can figure," Robert's mother said quietly, smoothing her apron as if all the peas were shucked now, and turning the palms of her plump hands outward, with gentle finality.

Spock cleared his throat, and both the earthlings turned to regard him patiently.

"We've just come from over-to the Vedder place," the Vulcan said, showing an unexpected grasp of rural syntax, himself. Although, to Kirk's ears, it sounded a little over-pronounced, like _Ti-con-der-o-ga_.

"Oh, poor Jane," Robert's mom nodded. "You know, I have to get over there, it's been a _week_."

Spock nodded stoically, as if he were the new pastor in town.

"You're Ms. Stamfield?" he asked, of their hostess.

"Yes, that's right," she said as if he, himself, might be the one coming out of a coma.

"And you have a diamorphic husband?"

At this, Ms. Stamfield seemed very startled again, and went a little pale under the Vulcan's even stare.

"Yes, that's right," she said, very quietly.

"According to Mayor Holdenreid," the science officer said, in a confidential way, "the diamorph has been altered, somewhat, in recent weeks."

"Oh, well, that's just nonsense," Ms. Stamfield smiled, shaking her head and looking to Captain Kirk with a reassuring smile, to dismiss the idea. "I mean, it changes all the time, just gradually, sort of."

"It's really no business of ours," Kirk said, putting the palms of his hands on the edge of the couch, as if he might get up to leave, out of sheer embarrassment.

"No, no, I don't mind," she said, looking away and leaning back in the chair that likewise orbited a coffee table.

"Might I be allowed to examine it?"

It all seemed far too personal for a home visit, to the captain. But Ms. Stamfield was up now, and brushing her hair off her brow as they went down the hall, closing Daniel's door all the way as she passed. She stood at her own bedroom now. Somehow, her down-home feeling had dried up, and she was more quiet.

When both men had joined her in the threshold, she wiped her hands again on the apron, and stepped inside. It was just another bedroom, with a larger dresser and more of a long bureau than a vanity, and the bed seemed higher, too high to climb up onto at the end of a long day. The draperies were strangely identical, though, to those of the Vedder house, casting the same soft light into the room.

And now, adding insult to injury, Spock had his tricorder out and trilling away as if they were on some uncharted world, full of unseen dangers. Lurking under the bed, Kirk could only assume.

"Luther," Ms. Stamfield said, quietly, between the foot of the bed and the dresser, almost shielded by the bed from the Starfleet explorers, wedged into the tightest possible space in the room.

The quilt on the bed began to twist, in the center, like a whirlpool of cotton and denim. It all rolled into a sort of tube or a giant, long _croissant_, stretching toward her right forearm, like the most fuzzy and warm and harmless of alien monsters. And suddenly Jim Kirk became aware of a bank of computer lights reflecting from below, up between the headboard and the mattress, up along the shining wood, and between the pillows, blinking and shifting colorfully.

As if reaching gently into an oxygen tent, Ms. Stamfield leaned over the footboard and put her hand in the bottom end of the rolled-up quilt. The computer lights grew brighter, and shone on the ceiling now, too, flickering and casting a strange glow around the room, making it no longer so quiet or mundane.

Kirk hadn't really noticed before, but he guessed the woman was wearing some kind of interface bracelet, on the wrist that had disappeared into the fabric.

"Luther," she whispered again.

Slowly, they could hear that familiar humming noise, much smaller than what they were used to on board the _Enterprise_. And then a faint, familiar, golden twinkling spread up her arm, and under her blouse, and played softly on her face. The dim glow under her apron, here and there, signified the fullness of the transformation.

And as the transporter-type lights faded, Ms. Stamfield had smoothly transformed into Mr. Stamfield. The lights above the bed faded, and all was quiet again. A single ray of sunlight raced by the window, as the sun began to set.

"For the woman who has everything," Luther Stamfield joked, removing his beefy hand from the covers. As polite as ever, though stubble shone on his more prominent cheeks and strong chin, and even the hair on his head was shorter now, completing the look. Almost as an afterthought, he reached over to the bureau to grab a pair of sweatpants, and slid into them.

"Will wonders never cease?" Kirk said, also politely.

"I suppose you'll want to examine my brainwaves?" Mr. Stamfield said, showing them back out of the bedroom again. Back in the living room, they sat down as before, more or less.

"What do you do if you forget your anniversary," Kirk couldn't help asking. The strangest things bothered him about strange things.

"Why, I don't speak to myself for a month," the diamorph exclaimed, as if it were an old joke. "Of course, that's the only time my children think I'm sane."

As if on cue, Spock had completed the adjustments on his hand-held scanner and walked round the table to crouch by Stamfield's side. Out of the bottom of the device, he opened a little door, and out dropped a medi-scanner. It warbled in the science officer's hand as he examined one section of the colonist's brain after another. The Vulcan's eyes clicked back and forth, from the little gizmo to the little screen in his other hand.

"But if you develop a _third_ personality," Kirk said, trying to puzzle it out, almost to himself.

"Well, I suppose I'd have to divorce myself!"

Kirk smiled, as irony seemed the best ambassador to all new worlds.

Spock's hand hovered, precise as a hummingbird, over Mr. Stamfield's skull. A moment later, looking mildly frustrated, he put the medi-scanner back in its hiding place in the tricorder. The three returned to the front room, where the science officer began to look at the readings.

"The data are, needless to say, somewhat unusual," he said, during a lull in the conversation. "However, if you don't mind the obvious intrusion on your privacy, I should like to compare these new readings with those from your initial days of colonization."

"That's fine," Stamfield said, seeing nothing diabolical in the Vulcan, in spite of the ears. And, with a few taps on the little viewscreen, Spock began looking at the before-and-after., using the mayor's memory plaque

He pursed his lips, obviously dissatisfied with the results. Kirk and Stamfield merely watched. The captain was thinking up jokey comments a mile a minute but, obviously, at some point, he knew that would grow tiresome. "Who gets the last word," or "when did you first fall in love with yourself?" and so on. Not entirely respectful. And who was to say this wasn't the future of all humanity, a thousand years from now? On Earth, some fish changed their gender, according to the population mix.

"So you're one of the farmers?" he asked, at last.

"No, no," Stamfield folded his big hands together near his knees. "I run the recycling plant."

"Oh!" Kirk said, his interest suddenly renewed. "I'd like to see that."

"Let's go," Stamfield nodded. "Back in an hour, Daniel," he called, as they stood in the doorway. Even his speech pattern and gait were purely male now. And, after the initial shock, Kirk was beginning to find the diamorph strangely unremarkable.

"Okay," came the distracted young voice from down the hall.

"But you were born a woman," the captain asked quietly, as the trio walked down the main street, still vacated after the storm.

"Oh, yes," Stamfield said, as if he, himself, was a little bored by the topic.

"And how often do you change back and forth?"

"We're both together at night," he said quietly, looking away, as though it were a personal matter. A few minutes later they came to a very small building that housed nothing more than a staircase down to a subterranean level. All three men were quiet, going down the metallic treads. Finally, when they reached the bottom, the captain spoke again.

"But what's the advantage?"

"Some things are just—easier—to do, as a woman; some things, as a man. And, in the moment, or in the hours, of transformation you are truly, truly two lives united as one!" He caught himself, and chuckled at his own version of romanticism. "But you can't live your whole lives in a transporter beam."

"I see," Kirk said. He was left to suppose they went to bed in a state of sustained transport, alternating characteristics, back and forth, till "they" fell asleep. "And, if something happens to one?"

"It takes a lot of mental control," Stamfield allowed, as they walked down a passageway to a humming factory-like area, under the buildings and the streets. "You have to know what's shared, and what's not. And, every time we have a prolonged switch, for maybe a few days, or even a week, each personality becomes more distinct. But that's good, because it makes the next, eventual reunion… really great!"

Then, he seemed embarrassed by his revelation of private, utterly internalized, romance—and fell silent. Until Luther Stamfield said something else, very quietly, that seemed to even take him by surprise.

"But I think, before she had me, she just got tired of being alone."

Of course, after that, there was nothing more to say about diamorphs, as loneliness somehow trumped any other complication, in a galaxy where freedom and individualism still had their price. A trillion kinds of loneliness: hoping to become something just the least bit beyond itself, and maybe just a part of someone else's life, if only in dreams.

But the rude geometry of solid waste disposal spread before them now and, all around, colored tubes and pipes running in every conceivable direction, creating odd empty cubes of dead space, and rectangles in between pipes, and abrupt web-like walls. A hundred other pipes began or ended in floors or ceilings, or stopped abruptly in mid-air, ending in heavy caps and valves, seemingly without reason, like the lowest decks of the _Enterprise, _where engineering necessity overcame conventional design. Here, though, a couple of men in white helmets and olive-colored jumpsuits approached, with wedge-pads in their hands. To Kirk, they had the bland look of guys who'd been concentrating on sewage and recycling all day, and who had somehow grown used to the steady, loud hum of machinery.

Rows of frictionless glass tanks along the far side of the underground room were churning away with brown liquid pumping inside: the waste of all of the colony being digested, along with all the old stalks from the fields and everything else, tumbling around and being processed into fresh water and fertilizer and building products, along with essential minerals and helper-bacteria. The tanks on the left seemed darkest, and those on the far right, at the other end of the facility, seemed quite transparent, at the end of the purification process.

For a minute, Stamfield chatted quietly with his men, who seemed to be teasing him over his sweat-pants and big blousy shirt, while the tanks churned away like a row of great antique washing machines. Then he introduced the Starfleet officers and, inevitably, one of the managers had a niece in the fleet and, just as inevitably, Kirk tried to recall something significant or at least pleasant to say about the girl's assignment. After that, the men in jumpsuits returned to checking machines and pipes.

"From here," Stamfield said, over the din, "all that gets flushed out to separation tanks."

"Just like the old days," Kirk half-shouted.

"Not exactly," Stamfield laughed, going in to the minutia of modern ground-based reclamation techniques for about three minutes. And he showed them every set of machines, every instrument board, and every blueprint and schematic, until they had seen it all.

"Well," Kirk said at last, "it's a far cry from the colonies I visited as a kid."

"This is pretty fancy," Stamfield nodded. "But, then again, we are in the galactic mainstream, even though it's all just farming, here," Stamfield explained. And that reminded Kirk of why they had come in the first place, and why one of the Talosians must have come, too: it was in the busiest section of the Federation of Planets, where they'd find the most new playthings to work like puppets. And now, a keeper was stuck here, by their intervention, their destruction of the way station. Around here, somewhere.

They said their goodbyes, and left him to his pipes and tanks and churning waters.

"What's the old saying," Kirk said quietly, as they climbed up the metal stairs again. "Men are from Mars, women from Venus… I suppose that means diamorphs are from Earth." The Vulcan didn't react.

"Any verdict, Spock?" Kirk asked, finally, as they regained the street and walked along the empty sidewalk.

"On the nature of diamorphism? I would not venture to judge," he said, seeming startled at the notion.

"On the keepers!" Kirk said, amused at the misunderstanding.

"It would be logical to assume they will either make some show of strength, or attempt to leave the planet."

"Or, both. And, why the rain? Or… lack… of rain." He was looking at the sky, and in the windows, as they walked in silence. It was such a simple thing, such an odd trick.

"Captain," an eerily certain voice called, from behind his back. As Jim Kirk turned, his hands tugged his green tunic down around his waist again, in what seemed like the usual fastidious gesture. But his casual air was shattered when he realized that Spock had disappeared from his side, and he faced a hard-looking Mayor Holdenreid there alone on the empty street.

"I can see now, Captain, you won't be of any help at all." The mayor was holding an old-fashioned phaser pistol, with the ungainly cylindrical muzzle pointing directly at Kirk's chest from about twenty paces away.

"I don't understand, Mr. Mayor." He kept his hands just out from his waistband, for he had not quite been ready for this.

"I do have an obligation to my people, you know," Holdenreid said, raising the pistol like a marksman.

The captain threw himself against a glass window, but it stubbornly refused to shatter, and he was still stuck out there, vulnerable to this strange new version of the man he'd spoken to less than two hours ago. He wheeled farther away, into a doorway, and tried the knob. Locked.

And then, it dawned on him: it might just be some kind of illusion. But, as he hastily rattled the knob again, and the mayor slowly approached with that cock-sure smile, he had to concede that the door was probably, actually locked. Kirk dove and rolled awkwardly down the sidewalk, first his shoulders and then his legs twisting around as they followed: around pillars and posts and storage boxes. It was not his best roll, and he was careening around a corner on his knees and hips and elbows to safety when a phaser blast blew-up against the side of the building, leaving his feet tingling inside his boots. The old fashioned _ping! _of the pulsed discharge reminded him of his first firing range at Starfleet—though, of course, they were only shooting at poly-ceramic blast-robots back then.

"Captain!" Spock called, from out in the street. Carefully, Kirk got up, circled back a few buildings, half-hunched over to bob and weave as necessary. After some careful corner-turning, he popped out behind his Vulcan first officer, to find Spock was already holding the mayor one-handed by the collar, with the out-dated phaser in his other hand, pointing harmlessly down at the street.

The mayor didn't have much to say after that, as they hustled him back to his office.

The captain closed the door quietly behind them, as Spock drew the medi-scanner from his tricorder again, for more readings. And Holdenreid seemed to slowly begin coming out of… whatever it was.

"I'm so sorry," he said, quietly. "I don't know what happened!"

"It's all right, Mayor," Kirk said, a little warily, sitting on the corner of the desk while the testing continued: Spock once again meticulously hovering the scanner back and forth over yet another human head. Holdenreid was blinking back tears now, and seeming to wonder if his entire career was over, all of a sudden, out of nowhere.

"How could I have missed my own test results," he asked, gripping the top of his desk.

"Your original readings were within the normal range, when you first took them," Spock said, still orbiting Holdenreid's skull with the whirring scanner. Kirk tried not to stare, but his own fingernails were becoming more and more disinteresting.

"It was as if, suddenly, out of nowhere," the mayor said, looking at Kirk in disbelief, "you epitomized everything that I had ever hated. Particularly, everything I'd hated about authority figures."

Kirk nodded, as the matter was quickly becoming scientific, and even strategic, as the question of the keepers loomed before them.

"Was it… a sudden change?"

"I don't think so," the mayor said, looking down, his expression still darkened by embarrassment.

"I don't mean to question your expertise," Kirk continued, leaning forward a bit, and speaking more softly, "but we aren't… entirely sure that Ms. Stamfield—or, Mr. Stamfield—was really as distorted as, say, the farmer's wife, Mrs. Vedder."

"I don't want to pass judgment on anybody," Holdenreid said, in what sounded like his own plea for understanding. "But I'd never dealt with anybody like that before. I just couldn't be sure about the readings!"

"We had the same problem," Kirk mused.

"It may be," Spock said, suddenly abstracted by a new thought, and lowering the little scanner as he stared across the room, "that the refraction, or transporter-induced dialectic between those two personalities, in one mind, creates an insurmountable degree of telepathic interference for the Talosians, during the gender-transport. If I may call it that." The Vulcan turned back to the tricorder once more.

Neither human could offer an opinion on that, as it was far beyond the scope of anything they'd considered before. And it seemed highly unlikely that any of them would be willing to oscillate back and forth from their own gender every few days, or to sleep in a transporter beam, on the remote chance of protection.

"All right," Kirk said, finally, as Spock put the medi-scanner away again. "Let's put Ms. Stamfield in charge, for the time being, since she seems to be the only one who can side-step the danger. Besides, possibly, Mr. Spock here."

"I suppose that's fine," Holdenreid said quietly, contemplating the alternative. "We can name her 'acting mayor,' or 'acting co-mayor' with her… husband?"

"In the meantime," the captain said quietly, "I'd like—"

But, Mr. Spock had suddenly tripped, or fallen, behind the mayor's desk, with a soft 'bump!' Holdenreid knelt out of the chair, and Kirk was there in a second: both humans, helping him up.

"Spock?"

The Vulcan's eyes had gone wide for a moment, and now he was the one sitting in the mayor's chair, recovering from his own, sudden jolt.

"I believe that whatever keeper was stranded here, by us, has sent out a telepathic signal: a call for help, to his people." And, somehow, it had seemed to punch directly through him, in a most unexpected way.

"You have freighters coming and going fairly regularly, through here?" Kirk spoke the words to the mayor, but his eyes had naturally turned up to the sky.

"Nothing much at this time of year—we're still weeks from the next harvest."

There was an awkward pause, as Jim Kirk tried to decide if there was any point in declaring a quarantine on Saldana II, like the that strangled Talos to a slow death. In fact, it might be too late. And then, like Hamlet going back and forth, he realized his own inaction might be the worst thing of all.

"Mr. Spock," he said, getting up, and dusting off his black pants. "Launch a beacon from the ship as soon as possible, warning computers on all other ships away, for the duration." Spock began adjusting the controls on his tricorder.

Like some outrageous after-thought, long after the rain, a huge burst of lightning exploded outside the mayor's gingham-covered windows. The roar of the thunder was immediate, and as loud as an old-style gunpowder rifle going off right next to Kirk's head. However, the Vulcan barely flinched, going through the ship's interlink on the scanner.

"What I don't understand," Kirk said, looking out through the window, "is why I still see the storm, but you don't."

"What are you talking about?" Holdenreid wondered. "Of course I see the storm."

"I attempted to deliver a sort of telepathic 'inoculation' to the captain, when we began our mission. Evidently, it was… not entirely successful," Spock said, looking mildly annoyed as he finished his command structure in the tricorder, and closed the top with a heavy _click_.

"And," Holdenreid looked quizzically at the Vulcan, "you _don't_ see the storm?"

"No sir."

But another kind of storm began just as suddenly, as colonists began racing out into the street, and into the apparent rain, every one looking for a fight of some kind or other. Probably, anything would do.

A big yellow crate smashed against the window, while he wasn't watching, and this time the glass actually did shower inward like a jagged, crystalline rain. Kirk only felt one cut, along his right temple, and blood began trickling down the side of his face.

It looked like the classic native uprising outside, even as the farmers and their families were doused with pelting rain, their hair smearing down their faces like wild vines, and their hard-working bodies showed sinewy under sopping clothes as they began destroying everything in sight. And whether they thought themselves in Paris in the 18th Century on Earth, or a starving colony on Tarsus IV, twenty years ago, the faces were the same: creased and stretched with rage run out of reason, as some keeper, somewhere, protested the sudden quarantine.

With barely a thought, Kirk stepped out the door and on to the street. He drew his phaser from under his tunic, as if he were on a playground full of unruly children, holding his weapon like a teacher's whistle. Then he fired it straight up into the air. He could hear the fiery hum, and see the glow of the green beam blazing up into space. But it didn't reflect across the raindrops, or sizzle the clouds away in some wavering chimney of steam, as it should. And if anyone else saw it, they weren't showing it. Storage boxes were being thrown on top of awnings and against windows, as the dark clouds raced by.

And then in the madness he felt a cold stab of insight, and realized that he was spending his entire life, just going from planet to planet, like a blind man stumbling through a chemistry lab: foolishly rubbing one glowing ointment against himself here, in a random way; or drinking another ghastly concoction from another planet's shelf that would eventually kill him, in some awful way. Being contaminated by telepaths was only the newest revelation. His whole career as a Starfleet captain was suddenly just an excuse to be splattered with indignities, as a ridiculous scapegoat for every reckless world in trouble. He felt, like all these ravaging men and women, he was only waiting to combust, when all the right chemicals came trickling together, running through his blood.

Then he glanced back and saw Spock, untroubled by the storm; with a mind that understood the dangers of reaching out, and Jim Kirk himself was suddenly impatient with the foolish dissatisfaction of men, even under the best of circumstances, even when all their needs were met, and the land seemed to sigh with satisfaction all around. There would always be a reason for fear, for all men.

"You people," he shouted, trying not to slip as he climbed up on one of the yellow crates, out in the river of the street. "What are you fighting about?" And, when that seemed to get no response, he added, "You're under the influence of something… outside yourself!" But even that was too roundabout, under the circumstances.

What could he tell them? There was no rain? The drops hung from his brow like water from a ledge, and smacked down against his skull, through his hair, till even the skin under his high-tech tunic felt sopping wet. That's how he knew Spock must be right, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. No Starfleet tunic would really let water through so easily.

Now Spock was standing nearby on the street, a half-meter shorter than Kirk up on his crate: the Vulcan's boots like sinking black boats in the rushing water. His dark eyes seemed to be looking _between _the colonists, into the fast-changing, almost strobing, empty spaces between their writhing bodies: into the madness itself.

And then, more or less without warning, the mob set upon them, and even Spock had his phaser out.

"On stun," Kirk said, needlessly, as he awkwardly climbed down and their backs almost touched. Their weapons moved out in front of them as they circled, and each man with one arm up to block the thrashing arms that swung and swirled in the street.

And, just like that, the mob stopped, and raced back into the doors and inner shadows of the buildings up and down the main street, like a hundred little tendrils on some branch of coral, all operating as one, withdrawing from the danger.

On an impulse, Kirk set out chasing one of them, the slowest moving, a big tall fellow loping along like a Clydesdale, nearly straight down the paved waterway: splashing as each work boot slapped down, until the captain had jumped and landed up on his shoulders. He staggered and tried to stay up, but Kirk had managed to wrap his legs around one of his own. Down they went with a splash.

And even as the great man fell forward, Captain Kirk understood how the fall of the Federation would be accomplished: the Talosians would drive the members of each world apart, or perhaps merely the leaders, through some fake storm or other, parallel contrivance. And, gradually, as had happened to the mayor, the telepaths would push them to the extremity of passion. Each keeper would break down the bonds between each colonist and his brethren, or each leader and his fellows, in the privacy of their own homes, during some restrictive, or inclement situation, rain or cold or dark of night... And then, having learned all they needed to know about the weakness and prejudice and hidden alienation in each man or woman, they'd set them against each other… and the order of fellowship would crumble, just like this man now, whom Kirk rode down like a great falling tree.

Then, as the big man raised himself up, and Kirk with him, the captain felt like the dog that finally caught the great big tram with his teeth. But the colonist shifted and turned to see who was on top of him, and a strange thing happened—the burly man became utterly horrified, and gave out a scream of surprise.

"Klingon!"

Kirk, too, was surprised, or even astonished—but only for a fraction of a second.

"I'm _not _a Klingon!" It was, without a doubt, the craziest thing he'd ever been forced to say.

"Get off me!" the larger man shrieked, though he seemed weighed-down by some greater force than Kirk's own set of kilograms. Finally, when the colonist had given up, the captain unhooked his leg from the pinned man, and Spock helped him up. At the same time, a strange mist filled the street, or the first foot or two, where the imaginary rain met some imaginary heat from the pavement.

"I'm not—" but he had to stop, realizing the madness of speaking was being drowned out by the madness of not-listening.

"Klingon!" It was another member of the crowd and, when the captain looked up, he could see there were five or six of them towering over him with that angry stiffness in their bodies, the far western sun poking through the clouds and silhouetting them from behind, making them the malevolent strangers in Kirk's eyes. The two Starfleet officers hurried back into the mayor's office and made their apologies to the little bald man, huddling over his desk, protecting it like a small island of order.

Kirk touched a button on his communicator and, in a moment, they were safely up in space again, a thousand kilometers above the colony.

"The better part of valor, Mr. Spock," Kirk sighed, still feeling defeated, as they stepped off the thick glassy pads and paused in the gangway to check on their passengers.

"Where is the Vulcan," a husky, Tellarite voice called, even as Spock hunched over the computer readouts by the dark aquarium. Kirk glanced up at Hof, and then back at Spock again, a bemused look on his face, at the general's odd question.

"He's—"

But Spock vanished, as if a spill of cold water had poured over a thin sand-painting, washing it away. The lights along the side of the black water panel went on blinking, without the science officer's attention.

"As I suspected," Hof nodded, and withdrew into his small cabin.

It took Kirk just a moment to digest all of this, and he hurried back to the transporter booth, to try and scan for Vulcan readings on the planet below. He wasn't finding anything. Or, something was preventing it.

"How did you know," Kirk said, when he'd finally given up and braced himself in the Tellarite's doorway.

"He was the irresistible bait," Hof said, not looking up from where he sat on the hard bunk, just staring with his eyes half open, past Jim Kirk's right knee.

"Explain."

"They served together, didn't they? He and the wheelchair man?"

"Yes." For eleven years.

"They had many adventures, together, correct? Many glories, many romances. Many life-threatening brushes with… the unknown." A proud, boastful note crept into his voice again, at the thought of dashing across the stars again.

Kirk supposed that Spock and Captain Pike must have had hundreds of "adventures," for certainly there were many new worlds the _Enterprise _had charted before he ever took command.

"The wheelchair man: he lives in Spock's memory," Hof said, tilting his head, as if it were perfectly clear.

"Of course," Kirk said, trying not to seem impatient with the suddenly playful alien.

"And now they'll use him to draw out the girl, from the farthest reaches of space: another cry across the systems." The Tellarite eased himself back into his hammock, as if it were all about to be over and done with.

"And she'll be drawn here, out of love for Chris Pike," the captain said, now staring off into the distance, beyond General Hof. "For Spock's own memories, for different views, to revive him in her… dreams."


	4. Chapters 6 and 7

**Chapter Six **

"He must be down there somewhere," Kirk said, very quietly, as if he were quite alone in the cockpit. General Hof stood over his shoulder, though, wedged in a casual pose, and still thin enough to nearly fit between the two pilots' seats. Kirk's hands played across the computer controls again and again, with a persistence that was becoming more and more abrupt. Anticipating an angry outburst, Hof stepped back toward the long gangway, out of arm's reach.

Down through the forward windows they could see the green, Earth-like planet, with its violet horizon, turning with what seemed like quiet reassurance. From up here, there were no storm clouds to anywhere near the center of the colony. Holographic projections hovered above the control panel, showing maps of the streets and the fields, and strange blobs of little red "H" shapes, representing human life-forms, massing this way and that, in what seemed a more and more hive-like set of behaviors.

"If they don't want you to find him, you won't," the general scoffed quietly, watching from a safe distance as Kirk performed the exact same sensor searches he'd been through a dozen times already. Meanwhile, the captain's own sense of exasperation grew steadily, as if each sensor scan was another course of bricks in a wall: between himself and his first officer; a wall that was getting too high to climb, as every minute passed.

"You know," the captain said, at last, "if you know what the Talosians are going to do next, it would be very helpful if you'd tell someone."

"You think I'm fool," the Tellarite explained, half turning, as if to go down the gangway and back to his cabin again.

"No, I don't," Kirk said, his voice as loud as his frustration was growing hot, though he dared not take his eyes off the scanner screen. "You just remind me… of how close I am—how close any of us is—to being _made_ a fool of, at any moment, by their power."

"Yes," Hof nodded, "and you treat me like some diseased person, dangerous to be around."

"And now the whole Federation… every one of us, we'll each be marching in our own big… _imaginary_ victory parade, just celebrating… ourselves. Until each of us wakes up alone: reeking in some cold dark cell."

"Well, then," Hof grinned, sneaking up behind him, and bending down by Kirk's ear, as if he might take a bite out of it with his yellowed canine teeth, "this is where it gets exciting, Earth man."

"What do you mean?" He didn't shrink away from the Tellarite's snout, and kept his tone even.

"Look at that," Hof said, nodding toward the life-form readings, still floating above the sweeping control panel. The "H's" were clumped in several piles now. "They form into groups, into clans. The clans form tactics against the others. Look, see?"

Kirk watched one group of "H's," that seemed to skitter, haphazardly toward another clump of life-form readings, like some strange virus, and seem to merge into it. Slowly, the big new group began to shrink in size again.

"It's how the keepers… amuse themselves, these days," Kirk said, disgusted. He pushed past the Tellarite, and walked quickly down to the transporter booth. His palm slapped against a sensor-lock on the weapons locker just outside, and its lid popped up to reveal a row of newly-charged phaser pistols, at the recognition of his touch. He clipped one weapon onto his belt and adjusted the booth controls for beam-down. Hof was soon by his side, and they twinkled out of existence.

_We must be near the end_, she heard Chris say, plain as day, just a few months ago. And yet, she could still see the zoo pen around them both, and the base of his medi-cube, as she huddled against it on the floor.

"What did you say?" she asked, stretching her arms and legs, and noticed a tell-tale dot of white blood cells on her right, inner elbow.

_We must be near the end_, she heard, in her own head, and the strange welcoming melancholy, the surrender to over two years' suffering, of the unquenchable fire burning on his flesh.

"Why do you say that," she said, slowly getting up, and putting her face right by his, so he could feel the warmth of her cheek. His eyes might have flickered one degree toward her, but she felt a strange nobility, a pure love, coming from him. Vina draped her arms around his head and neck, hoping to comfort him.

_If they're giving us little doses of their own blood_, Pike reasoned carefully, _it's because they've nothing else to give. Because they've given up. _ _It's not a communion of renewal, it's a communion of the end._

"Don't say that," she admonished, as ridiculous as it seemed, for the old woman and the ruined man, living one worn dream after another.

_You can hear me._

"Of course I can—" It had been so natural to her, in their dreams, she didn't really think about it till now. But she'd never heard him like this, in a waking state of ruin.

_You've got to get out of here_, he said, in her mind.

She began to cry, and would have sobbed, if she hadn't felt a very stern hardness come alive in him, an unmistakably military sense of command. She wanted to die with him, as they had faced death together so many times now.

But his mind was pushing her out toward the old hole in the glass wall, guiding her away from his dying body. She turned back, wishing she could be certain, somehow, that he'd be there when she came back. Or, that he really, truly had spoken, from that shrunken body and scorched face, directly into her head.

But what else was there to do? She made her mind a blank, the way they would when they were too exhausted to amuse their keepers any longer, and crawled out through the old phaser hole in the big transparent barrier. Getting out took much longer than she expected, like giving birth to herself, through some false idea of herself, after all these decades. The real Vina finally stood on the other side of the barrier, seeing her reflection, seeming to look back at her, and then Chris, farther back inside, looking as though he'd left himself behind years ago. And here she was, before her, like the shifting colors on the surface of a bubble. She turned away at last.

She found an elevator pad and, before she knew it, she—or Chris—had thought "_down!" _And down she went, even farther into the depths of a world that had never (till now) stopped burrowing deeper into her.

Now, two months later, she felt a sudden, beautiful pain in her chest as her stolen ship left the Pleasure Planet. It wasn't a physical thing, she knew right away; but, still, like a stabbing sensation from a sword of light: as if all her longing for Chris had been concentrated into a single blade of energy, piercing her heart like fire. She drew a cautious breath, though the crew was still unaware of her presence, on this stolen yacht. The sword withdrew from her body, but still seemed to glow in the distance, down and away and half-way to starboard. Not really there, on sensors, but somehow nice and clear to her mind's eye. It had opened an old wound, cutting too deep to be ignored, and left a trail that must be followed.

The crew around her had left their vacations only half-spent, and were briskly plotting to take their ship to safe distance before warping from the system, not realizing they were leaving early. And now Vina knew two things: first, that the dreamers of Talos IV had finally tracked her down; and second, somehow they'd found a living link back to Chris.

It must have been someone who loved him very much, she thought: a father or brother or even a son, she had somehow never learned of—and who had spent a great deal of time with him, and whose love could be harnessed and projected across the stars to this spot on the galactic map. She had no choice but to struggle against self-preservation, and follow that beam of thought. Because somewhere, someone had kept Chris Pike alive in their own heart, more alive than she could by herself anymore, in some much more exhaustive, analytical way. And she wanted Chris back, at any cost. Surely, whoever she was tracking now, whoever loved him that much, would be content to re-live that love, again and again.

Her fingertips tapped against the amulet around her waist, though it was of no use to her now. But it was a symbol of how she and Chris had conspired, to revive the keeper's own forgotten tools to escape. The amulet had also become a symbol of how much they hoped to prevent… what had finally happened anyway.

She was being split in two, into the half that wanted to honor Chris's wishes for her freedom, and somehow protect humanity from everything they'd learned from her and her love; and the half that just wanted Chris back.

The private yacht tipped out of the solar plane, as Wrigley II rolled up and away to port-side and the golden sun dove out of sight, too. Then, in a silent _whoosh_, the newly revealed galactic arm exploded in a pincushion of light. New displays of the hyper-space terrain popped up on control panels here and there, and the ship was on its way. Interior lights in the command deck came up, to compensate for the loss of the warm reflected glow of the amusement world, now under a strange quarantine itself.

Too bad about the yacht's wealthy owner himself but, as far as he knew, he was still on Wrigley, enjoying a lovely vacation. And as far as anyone else on board knew, his body in the medical office was just that of a crewman with a bad case of Rybeck's fever. And by the time it had "broken" she'd be at her next stop: one step closer to Chris: a _new_ Chris, to be seen and loved through a new pair of eyes.

She had to rub her forehead again. The bursting sensation came and went and, though she could never be sure if her own brain was really growing to such astonishing, Betelgeusian dimensions, it certainly seemed heavier with each passing day. With every new mind she explored, and with every old Talosian she finally deleted from the fabric of space, she felt as though the plaster of her skull was crackling outward just a little bit farther, beyond her previous hat-size. She didn't know if there was a limit to how much like one of them she could become, before her own head burst. But, at least, new dreams from this newly dangled bait would refresh her.

It was like one of those old romantic stories, or even one of her own dreams: where the two lovers, impossibly separated, suddenly catch sight of one another from afar, and begin racing together, until they met on a flower-strewn hill-top. Always a hill-top. The field of joy and gardens of delight that surrounded them were everything they had lost, everything that had already spilled out and gone away, everything that should have been. Of course, when Chris came back to Talos, the hill-top was just a shattered pile of rocks on a ruined world. But this time, they'd meet in someone else's dream: and the hill-top would be inside a third person's mind would be brand new. Well, she smiled to herself, they'd done it everywhere else, by now.

The navigator's sleeping hands rose clumsily to the control panel, and he gradually seemed to drift up to consciousness, his eyes half-open. After a very long moment of focusing on the blinking lights beneath his hands, she could see the equations coming to life in his head, and see what he saw: the gravity wells and other ships off in the far, far distance. With horrifying proximity, one of the very distant dots suddenly flashed overhead, in a pre-planned, pre-negotiated fly-by. And, just as blithely, the navigator entered the speed change, and their early departure, which would then go into commercial mapping treaties, before he slumped back into his chair again. The hum of the engines rose another octave.

The Tellarite shifted uneasily once Hof and Kirk had beamed down to Saldana II. His snout seemed to rear back from his teeth in the still farm air, and his dark lips quivered, revealing those yellow fangs. The remains of the street riot tumbled around them on the perfectly dry dirt road, devoid of people, and Jim Kirk could hear the very slight "crunch" of the treated, compacted soil under his boots, and the distant, persistent creak of a whimsical, faux-antique windmill, groaning thinly, over and over and over. Clearly, though, it hadn't rained in weeks.

A store-front sign wavered slightly in the breeze: GRANT'S SUPPLIES & SUBSPACE. But no one lined-up today, to talk with grandma, a quadrillion miles away. The captain snapped open his tricorder with one hand, his phaser still gripped in the other. General Hof's breathing was husky and shallow, as he turned this way and that, mirroring (unconsciously) the same sweeping movement of the human, with the scanner.

"Spock!" Kirk shouted, down the long, empty street. After the silence became apparent again, he started walking back to Holdenreid's office.

"Mr. Mayor?" he called out, looking around the office. And like a comical deputy following the brave sheriff, Hof lumbered along, determined to keep up. They stepped inside, cautiously, as if the roof might be about to collapse in front of them, and gradually made their way through the mess that had been made tearing pictures and proclamations off the walls, and overturning furniture. The clock had been thoroughly destroyed, broken open on the floor, its old springs and gears smiling up dully.

Kirk tried to activate the computer that now lay sideways on the floor, and held up the tricorder by its side, to salvage any recent changes. But he didn't want to stand around and read it, when the madness could return at any moment.

"You knew, before I did," Kirk said quietly, only glancing at the Tellarite, "that Spock was missing, when I got back to the ship. Can you see anything unusual now, that I'm not… seeing?"

Hof shrugged as if the question were somehow ridiculous. "Only the signs of some riot, or looting."

Kirk nodded. He left the deathly-still office, feeling something had been left undone—not just upset and torn apart, but to no purpose, in defiance of… logic. They stepped out into the dry street once more.

A sound like a little rip of fabric, or a distant boot twisting on the street, made the captain turn. He let the tricorder slip and dangle against his waist, and his phaser was pointed in that direction before he'd fully turned. There was the farmer's wife, the woman in the rocking chair, walking toward him. She still seemed to be in a dream-like state.

"Mrs. Vedder!" he called, as if she weren't already walking this way. Hof turned, too, his furry ears pointing one way and then another, as they watched her slowly growing nearer. Kirk lowered his weapon a bit.

"Are you insane?" It was Hof, weighing him down, hastily thrown over the captain's suddenly upraised arm, ready to fire. The two landed in the street with a _thump! _and wrestled in the dust as the strange, transfixed woman kept drifting toward them. But Kirk couldn't be sure now, if his arm had gone up or down, as he held the weapon in her direction. Finally they scrambled back to their feet, though Hof's powerful arms still pinned Kirk's at his sides.

The purple light, lost in a silvery cloud, suddenly returned. And just as quickly, the shadow of the space elevator fell like a knife across a distant field. Meantime, Kirk's own sense of true north, or his faith in the long arms of sundials, was starting to get shaky.

"Mrs. Vedder! What's happening?" And yet, she continued her slow approach. Her head rocked back and forth as she walked, as if she were still in her darkened bedroom, in her favorite chair, or nodding in church on a Sunday morning.

In a flash, his bowels were gripped by icy fingers, and he woke up in one of those exhibit cells on Talos, filthy and alone. In a minute or so, the cold water would spray down on him again, out of the ancient pipes in the rocky ceiling, and everything that had spilled out of him during his dreams would go swirling down a drain in the stony floor. And the thought of four hundred and thirty other crewmen, _his _crewmen, out of sight in their own cells, scattered through those caves and magma tunnels filled him with a crushing dread. He knew, and had known all along, the _Enterprise_ had been trapped there since they brought Chris Pike back two years before. And somewhere, in some great dry ocean bed up on the planet's surface, his ship must lie in ruins, in a vast graveyard of interstellar vessels: the _Enterprise _being greatest of them all, scorched by its descent and ripped apart by its collision in the wasteland.

But then he felt the Tellarite jostling him again, and trying to take the phaser pistol out of Kirk's hand. It didn't make sense, but he was suddenly seeing flashes of people in the street, here on Saldana, clawing their way past one another toward Mrs. Vedder. General Hof was checking the stun-setting on the weapon, as he raised it toward them all.

The crowd overtook her, and she disappeared into the dream-like riot, swallowed up by the people coagulating around her, though she seemed completely unaware. The colonists, heads down and still squinting away the rain they believed was washing down their faces, fell with her. But their arms were beating and rising and falling like brutal ocean waves, like an irresistible torrent. They fell the rest of the way down to the street and slept as if they, too, were just specimens in cages on Talos. There was no more of Mrs. Vedder anywhere to be seen, beaten out of existence, like an unwanted dream herself.

After a stunned moment, the captain walked toward the heap of Saldanans lying in the middle of the street. The Tellarite watched, from where they had been standing, at a safe distance. Jim Kirk stepped between all their elbows and knees and heads and feet; and the hands, reaching inward in the collapse, as he searched for the farmer's wife: disappeared just like Spock, without warning. The riddling prophetess and the stoic voice of reason, just gone.

So he stood there in the middle of the slumbering mob, almost tempting them to rise again and do the same to him. But his mind was racing as he tried to remember every little bit he could about the keepers, and every little fragment he might have overheard at Spock's court-martial for spiriting Captain Pike away on the hijacked _Enterprise_, two… point seven? years before_._ All the while, he felt like he was standing in the ruins of his own species. It made him long for the edge of the galaxy.

He didn't notice until now, but he realized there were stones lined up in a big circle, like some historic old farm village, informal markers: more or less surrounding the bodies in the street.

And then, out of the ground, the decorative rocks rose up into sharp fangs: small at first, like dinosaurs'. And they grew, out of the ground, until they curved up and inward, into the circle, each over a meter high. And he realized he was standing in the mouth of some monstrous serpent, and suddenly it was dark, all around, and all the bodies were falling down its throat, from the center. The sky closed up like a purple eye far above. They were all sealed inside the endless depths.

His face felt bloodless and cold, and his own stomach was full of sharp rocks as he struggled to remember Spock, and the _Enterprise_, and Bones, his physician and friend. And like a wavering mirage, the darkness blew away, like smoke, and he was back in the street again, his arms folded across his chest like a pharaoh's. The mind-meld, to help him find himself at times like this, had finally worked.

Then he felt the rain against his scalp, and on his back, slapping against him with a kind of disdain, as if he were being overcome again. And he knew then that, without Spock, he'd soon be like the others.

"Come on," he said, walking past the Tellarite, who seemed openly disgusted by these hairless, small-nosed, fangless beasts, who couldn't handle their liquor, or whatever was poisoning them. They walked to that same little out-building that was the entryway to the machine-works beneath this world.

And he felt, right away, that something was wrong. There was a strange, high-pitched quality to the sound of the recycling vats, as if they'd been pressed to the limits and would certainly shut down at any moment, from over-heating. The two crept down the metal stairs, to the purification center.

"Spock!" he called, for no particular reason except that, once again, he was growing very worried.

Hof, who had never been down below the streets and the outpost buildings, moved forward into the waterworks like a blind man: his paws slightly outstretched, somehow feeling the metallic hum, even in his thick finger pads.

The tanks were rumbling away, turning impenetrable brown waves of foamy water into clear. An occasional, muffled _clunk_ signaled something banging around in one tank or another, like a space helmet tumbling in an airlock, if such a thing could produce any sound at all. He grew angry at himself, now, for hearing things that couldn't possibly be.

"Spock!"

"He's not here," the Tellarite said, having sniffed carefully, lifting his face up and drinking the scents from the air, like water from a stream.

Kirk drew his tricorder, though you could barely hear the warbling noise it made over the rushing of the pipes and the steady boom of the vats, and the strange roar of the pumps. He moved into the center of the long, wide room and turned around twice, slowly. Hof moved farther toward the great transparent tanks, as if to make space for him, though they were nearly ten meters apart. Foggy reflections of each man stretched out on the glossy, painted floor, evaporating before the whole image could be revealed.

"In the name of—" Hof gasped, and he was suddenly a meter closer to Jim Kirk. The captain looked up, and around, and took a few steps toward the general. Soon, they both began walking very slowly up to one of the vats, watching the strange flowing inside, for what seemed like a full minute.

"What did you see?"

Hof shook himself, and made an incredulous sputtering sound. His arm waved up and away, like something horrible flying up at him.

There was another audible _clunk! _in the next vat, that distracted them from the swirling waves against the flat clear panels of the recyclers.

"There!" Hof declared, pointing. Kirk held up the tricorder, and they both watched a disembodied skull, still partly fleshed-out, bobbling against the inside of the glass, as if it were looking for some sign of recognition in their own complete faces. Then, hurrying along, it seemed to turn away and disappear in the murk again, jaw half-open in a shriek.

"The darkness…" Kirk remembered, "gives up its dead. But only for a moment."

And then, as if to complete Mrs. Vedder's prophesy all at once, an arm, mostly white bone, bumped against the barrier, over and over: as if swimming upward against forceful currents. One end seemed to end in a hacked ball joint, and the other in a badly decomposed wrist, like melting wax.

"And… the candles… have no hands," Kirk said, very quietly, shifting his weight. Hof stared at him as if the human might be about to faint.

The mob came pouring down the metal stairs.

**Chapter Seven **

It was a hard moment for the captain of the _Enterprise. _He knew the dozens of people raging toward him, as he backed up against the recycling tanks, were not really aware that what they were doing, or even thinking, was coming from outside of themselves.

Reasoning that a sizable distraction was in order, he fired the weapon up into the pipes overhead, between himself and the mob, who still hunched down as if to avoid the outdoor storm, even down here in the subterranean level.

A piercing energy blast turned the very air green and white for a second, and then every imaginable form of waste began showering down on all of them, from the scorched pipes up above. In all likelihood (he hoped) every one of them would suddenly remember messing the bed as a child, and be overwhelmed by that, more than any shared fantasy of Klingon invasion, or mob justice.

He glanced back over his shoulder at General Hof, who was laughing uncontrollably. Unidentifiable brown and black liquids ran down Kirk's face, as the Tellarite wisely stood back between the vats against the far wall.

And it was in the moment he took to survey the scene around him that one of the Saldanans grabbed his phaser, and tried to wrest it from Kirk's hand. The two men slipped in the pools of waste and began rolling one over the other on the slimy concrete floor, even after the next energy blast. A recycling tank exploded by Hof, and suddenly his reddish-brown fur was drenched and darkened, as he looked up in stunned surprise. His great snout shivered as he looked at himself now, drenched in waste, too.

The comedy ended just as abruptly, though, when a loose assortment of bones and body parts washed out onto the wet floor with the rest of the brown-water from the tank, around his great bear-like feet. Another skull—or, perhaps, the first one all over again—tumbled this way and that, till it landed on its side, barely two meters away: one filmy blue human eye still barely in its socket, bearing witness. Flaps of withered flesh hung around the mouth like the husk from corn, partially gone to the birds.

Now the colonists really were soaked, and the smell only seemed to make them madder. Jim Kirk finally scored a strong fist across his first attacker's jaw, and that farmer tumbled backward and slipped into momentary unconsciousness on the floor. Kirk struggled to stay on his feet, as the mob was nearly upon him. He didn't really have time to re-adjust his phaser setting, but he couldn't just blast them into a dawning light, either.

Inevitably, when he had the pistol powered-down to "stun," they were already leaping to close the final half-meter. He pulled the trigger, and caught enough of the energy wash to knock himself down too, and his whole head and torso felt like a nasty hangover. When he struggled to his feet, in the pelting brown rain, his shoes felt two sizes too small. He had never had such bad luck with phasers before.

"There!" Hof exclaimed, pointing over Kirk's shoulder. He turned just in time to get under another one, diving for his neck. With the captain's rough shrug, the colonist went over Kirk's back, and landed with a loud splash. Slippery and wet, the phaser bounced away, along with the other man.

He reached for his communicator, to code-in a transporter signal, but it had come off his belt in the scuffle. His eyes darted all around, trying to find it in the puddles of water. As soon as he began to concentrate though, another man had come splashing across the plant floor and tackled him, smashing him in the face with a great farmer's fist. And either Kirk's temper had grown short, or he was finally mastering the slippery mess beneath his hands and knees, for he was free again in a moment's time, thanks to a punch of his own. But as they shook off the effects of the stun, the crowd began crawling toward him, and his equipment was nowhere to be found.

He couldn't see the phaser right away, pointing at him, but could easily see the familiar extension of a right arm in his direction, in the corner of his eye. And the absolute certainty of that nearly rigid pose made him throw his legs and hips over in a roll, and sent him spinning back into the muck, sliding across the fetid indoor lake for cover.

Another tank of brown liquid exploded over his head, and more bones and wads washed out in a flood, into the center of the room, till the living and the dead and the thick, soupy mess were all sloshing around as one. It was probably just his imagination but, right around then, even the ceiling seemed to be shaking.

Another fist smashed right into his face, and he could taste the filthy water mingled with his own salty blood. "Cholera," his memory warned, but even that sounded like a step-up from things as they were. Then another blow struck him in the throat, and more were bursting against his ribcage. And he was being dragged, haltingly, toward the third recycling vat: expecting to be dumped in and dissolved, slowly turning into crystal clear water, and grit for the roads.

They shoved him against the glass, and he could see the swirling hot cauldron inside as they inched him up to the intake chute, to be fed in like a dead farm animal. There was nothing to grab on to, and his hands smeared and squeaked against the wet tank, pushing, sliding upwards, as he reached the open edge at the top. He thought he could feel the hot vapor inside splattering against his head as they hoisted him up, sideways.

Now all he knew was the pounding, roiling action of the hypersonic waves inside the dark water, and the crashing seemed to be turning his head inside out. For a moment, he wasn't sure if he was in the brown liquid yet, as the roar and the filth had become overwhelming.

But he could see a strange new light from one side, even as meaty farmer hands were shoving him down, no matter how hard he struggled against them. And a hard, silvery light from the sky seemed to boil and shimmer, reflecting on the floor. Weird dark shapes were shuddering upward through the pipes that barred the sky, and somehow he knew there were bodies flying up into the atmosphere, even as they were being ripped apart, drawn and quartered: as if strung between wild horses, and torn into rough pieces. But it was just the air, or something invisible, like some random vengeance that came along when it did.

It wasn't any sort of Rapture he could imagine, though. Their bodies seemed to vibrate and flail and shake apart , and the pieces were still flying higher, along with bits and gallons of brown water slurping up from the floor. And somehow he knew this was all the work of a tractor beam, high up in space, even as he fought to stay above the tank's edge. And as much as he didn't want to sink any lower into the recycler, he suddenly dreaded very much rising any higher than with his nose and eyes barely above the splashing mess. Now he clung to the edge of the tank cover, still mostly in place, hoping the tank itself was securely fastened to the rest of the planet.

A modest space capsule descended inside the invisible beam, shivering as it came down into the watery chamber, below the street level, carefully lowered by a ship's energy beam up in orbit. But the new humming was even worse than the old. And the ragged remains of colony buildings overhead, up beyond the hold in the street, billowed as if caught on the edge of a tornado, stretching upward like reflections on some twisted sheet of plastic. Down on the slick floor, brown water rushed away in all directions from the little escape vehicle, as it came to rest in a sudden dry patch.

An explosive _bang! _signaled the popping of the hatch, and in a few moments, a beautiful blond woman in what looked like a luxuriant animal fur coat stood up inside, like a beauty pageant winner, emerging from an egg-shaped cake. She climbed up very slowly, and Jim Kirk could see her beautiful collarbone, and the golden space between her breasts, and the softness of her belly, all barely wrapped in black triangular swatches, beneath the furs. His own first reaction was one of sudden masculine hunger, though he thought he thought he could also hear the strange screaming, and the cries of anguish from the muck all around, as Vina stepped out.

He hauled himself out of the churning hot mess, and barely managed to lower himself from the slippery glass edge, thinking all the while, "_this is NOT going to be my most charming introduction, to a lovely young lady."_

The colonists slowly fell silent, scattering to the far corners or under the stairs, or trying to lie still amidst the bones and sewage. As if she were some dread goddess of unknown rule, some proud and vengeful deity they'd discovered too late.

Water raced outward in circular waves from her black boots, as she patted her way around the grand mess, wordlessly glancing here or there, looking disdainfully at the mess. And after she'd perceived everything in the great circle of light from the peeled-up street above, she turned toward the captain, who was walking toward the jagged shaft of light above the escape pod, becoming more and more upright in his carriage.

He introduced himself in the standard fashion, though he elected not to offer a filthy hand.

"My name is Vina. Lately of Talos IV."

"Yes, I know. Doctor," he added, remembering the honorific, and her scientific status from her original, doomed voyage.

She smiled with amusement at how easily he maintained an aura of boyish appeal, or perhaps even enhanced it, by his wretched appearance. He didn't even need keepers' blood to foster the illusion. Meantime, his own eyes began scanning the floor and the water around their feet for his equipment.

"Over there," she said, tilting her head and, sure enough, he spotted the communicator, upside down and hanging open like the roof of a tiny, flooded farmhouse, several meters away.

"We meet again, General," she said aloud, slowly turning to the remains of the second great tank, against a dark wall. The Tellarite edged out from behind, looking extremely wary.

"Would you care to accompany us up to our vessel," Kirk offered. "General Hof and I could both use a little clean-up."

"I have some business here to attend to, here," she said, smiling without happiness once more. "Besides," she added quietly, "while I might possibly convince you that I'm still young and beautiful, Captain, I'm not quite sure I can convince myself you're clean and… fresh."

"Fair enough," he chuckled, managing to find his phaser on his own, and scooping it up out of a quarter inch of slime.

A little throng of people appeared up above on the street, around the edge of the tractor beam's devastation, and they peered down in horror. The off-worlders made their way up the metal stairs, and onto the street.

An hour later, a little old man in a bright yellow tuxedo poured them tea, a few blocks north at a sidewalk cafe. Tiny bells on his trembling fingers tinkled as he filled each cup in last rays of the violet sunset. Jim Kirk had just come out of a restroom where he shook-out his uniform, making it instantly clean again, and washed his face and hair in a little sink. But, at the table again, he began to wonder if there were a link between Spock's disappearance, and Vina's sudden arrival. If Spock really was "the bait."

"I suppose it was you, destroyed the way-station," she said genially, smiling and looking at him through hooded eyes. Her lips were pink and delectable.

"Yes," he said, pretending modest surprise, and taking a sip of tea. "I suppose it was."

"You can't contain them," she said, looking away, her smile becoming faraway, enigmatic; perhaps defiant. "They have what everyone wants: dreams, sweeter than their own lives."

"And you think you can? Contain them?"

There was a pause, in which some sort of long-necked birds took flight across a distant field. Meantime, the Tellarite was using his own cup of hot tea and a napkin to daub at his fur, though it was far too tiny for a sponge-bath. He must have developed a hatred of small, enclosed spaces, which evidently extended to washrooms. Behind him, far, far up in the sky and above the scattered clouds, the space-elevator glowed, still catching the last wholesome rays from below the horizon.

"If I can't," she smiled again, entrancingly, "there's not much hope for any of us, is there?"

"I'm not sure… that everyone in the galaxy… will choose fiction over fact," he said, trying to sound polite.

She smiled again, and sighed. "What happens to someone like me, Captain?" She didn't have to wipe away the illusion of beauty to reveal a prolonged sense of hopelessness, echoing deep in her eyes, wrapped up in a permanent layer of ironic glamour now. "If I had left with Chris, the first time, I'd never have gained the power of the keepers. And Chris would never have had anything at all, after the radiation blast, but a hospital room: plain and clean and empty."

"He might have had you, if you'd just come along with him, the first time," Kirk said, as diplomatically as he could. He decided to probe deeper. "The keepers gave you a new life together, and now you want to wipe them out?"

She shifted in her seat, as if that invisible hump on her back were suddenly aching. With an almost mechanical gracefulness, she took another sip of tea, in an apparent show of mastering the pain. "You know, I was nearly dead when our ship crashed on Talos. I would have died, if they hadn't tried to keep me alive."

He already regretted the whole conversation, as she huddled into that luxuriant fur coat, her golden skin teasing him from within its lustrous folds.

"I told Chris it wasn't their fault, that I was so… hobbled… in every way. But it gradually dawned on me that they were almost textbook examples of humanoids, themselves. At least, as far as their skeletal structure was concerned." Her look changed to a kind of scoffing. "They had every reason to know what to do with all my broken bones. They simply decided that… all they really needed was a working mind."

"And you think… they made sure to leave you… ugly."

She looked straight in his eyes, as if suddenly aware that he was trying to rile her. "The better to flee into dreams," she whispered, nostalgically, her gaze wandering.

He nodded. Then he noticed it had already grown dark around them, and there were no colonists on the streets. General Hof had used up the tea in his cup, and the old man in the yellow tuxedo had not yet reappeared with more. The Tellarite folded his great hairy arms across his belly, and closed his eyes.

"I have to hand it to you," the captain admitted, though he, too, was growing exhausted, trying to distinguish dreams from reality, and worrying about Spock, "I never would have guessed that anyone could escape."

"They were once a very advanced people," she smiled, as if she were also taking stock of Kirk's own natural sense of mastery. "But where our brains stopped growing, as a species, a few hundred years ago, theirs kept getting bigger and bigger. And… all the wrong parts I suppose," she added, though it made no sense from a purely evolutionary standpoint, once they had mastered their own survival.

She settled farther back into her great pelts, and smiled at the way the Universe worked sometimes: everything behind her now, and nothing more ahead, except the nearly futile task of weeding the gardens of men's minds. All that lay ahead was the hope of that strange new bait, of seeing some new side of Chris Pike, of falling in love with him again, in a totally new way, through some new pair of eyes, before she died.

For Kirk, it wasn't hard to imagine her covered in scars again, in the dim street light, which cast odd little shadows. But now and then her lips glistened, and her eyes shone. And he knew she was remembering Chris, for he knew a thing or two about women.

General Hof began to snore quietly, haltingly at first. And as the Tellarite's head tilted back, the snoring settled into long sighs, with little flourishes like ragged, arching brush-strokes on the canvas of his own dreams.

"So what brings you to Saldana?"

She smiled again, looking down into the bottom of her teacup. "Good fortune, I hope."

"To good fortune," he echoed, taking one more sip, and toasting with his own empty cup, across the little table.

"Chris was quite a brilliant man," she said, though now she was just a little glowing face wrapped in a fur collar.

Kirk nodded.

"And whether they knew it or not, or whether _we _knew it or not," she said, seemingly accustomed to reasoning in a hall of mirrors, "he brought their civilization back to life."

"I… can't imagine," Kirk said quietly, not quite wanting to believe it, and folding his own arms across his belly, in a manner like Hof's. It might end up being the worst betrayal in human history, if he couldn't stop them soon.

"We thought we could do it, and no harm done," she said, as though she were reading his thoughts, though she looked down, as if reading her tea leaves again. "You know, not every one of them had the power," she confided. "Those that didn't were kept far below, tending the feeding labs, or wandering the endless paths of… ancient machines. To no purpose." Her voice drifted off again, as it was wont to do, in a sing-song manner: as if reciting a nursery rhyme no child should ever have to hear.

"Somehow, their blood worked in me—people don't—beings don't—always respond the same way to different stimuli or compounds." She gave a little nod in Hof's direction, as if she almost felt sorry for him. Or, perhaps it was a look of jealousy, hidden in fur and shadows.

"And you were able to reach into the minds of the Talosians? Of the non-dreamers?"

"It may just have been another illusion," she said, with a smile that utterly failed to disguise her bitterness at the way things turned out. "And now? They're everywhere."

"But… why here?

"It has to be the right mix," she said, and sighed, before leaning forward with a kind of warrior nature. "Isolated, but accessible. Simple, but important. Not too sophisticated, but…" and now, she paused, as the old man finally came back and poured them tea once more. "But with a kind of pride, or self-pity, that makes them, strangely, more vulnerable... to dreams of glory, or the hatred of some old, or borrowed, or worn-out… sense of persecution. It's better if their prey has no hope. That's something anyone can find in a new dream."

"I don't understand," Kirk said, after a moment, utterly perplexed. "Why would they take this huge, dramatic step?"

"The death of their world, after so many hundreds of centuries," she said. "It was finally happening, and all their captives were dead, or nearly so. They simply didn't want to die, when it came right down to it."

"And Chris Pike… gave them a way out."

"He didn't know," Vina insisted, quietly. "He just knew there was no point in my staying."

"It's an impossible bargain, any way you look at it," Kirk said, at last.

"They stole my life, my dreams, and everything that mattered."

"But they didn't want anything to do with humanity, after Pike's first visit," Kirk insisted.

"Perhaps. Or, if no one suspects, then there's no further danger for them," she said, meeting his hazel eyes with a bitter little smile, beautiful nonetheless. "They didn't suspect me, either. No one will." She produced a flat cigarette case from her coat, and leaned into a little votive on the table to light the peach-and-gold colored cylinder of synthetic tobacco.

"Then," Kirk sighed, looking disappointed, and maybe even a little bit angry, "Vina is only on Vina's side."

She laughed a little, but very quietly, and took a little drag on her cigarette, in the dark.

"You think there are sides," she smiled, looking away. The smoke curved along with her gaze.

Now, she had his full attention, though she only drew another puff from the cigarette.

"You think consciousness is what you see, and feel, and how it all fits together with any other little thing that's on your mind," she said, luxuriating in something that seemed like insanity, either hers or his.

"To be one of us," she said, in a faraway, quiet tone, "is to be like the great clouds, or decks of clouds, between you down here, and the sun up above. I'm spread-out: I occupy some particular amount of your sky. But they're a great network of thoughts and plans: far, far in all directions." She blinked, at last, and Jim Kirk could hear the sound of dishes and plates being shuffled around inside the little café.

Mayor Holdenreid came hurrying at them in the dark, from around a corner, through spills of window-light. The moment he'd seen them, and began running, his shoes struck the flat earth street so hard they threw up spiral arms of dirt in the dark, like water from another puddle.

"I've been looking all over for you!" the mayor said, breathlessly, and held out a memory plaque. But he could see Kirk was without his tricorder, and so he fumbled inside his jacket for a mini-viewer. The yellow rectangular plate clicked against the back, and the front came to life as Kirk and the woman of Talos leaned in closer to look. The thick rolls of fur tumbled down her spine, revealing nothing more than a few crisscrossed black straps against her beautiful flesh.

"As near as we can tell, these are all the victims of the… uprising," Holdenreid said, otherwise at a loss for words, but pointing at a list that magnified where his fingertip hovered: this benign farmer, that hopeful biochemist, nearly three dozen people, each suddenly dead without reason.

But that was wrong. There was a reason. It was just too sprawling to contemplate.

"There were thirty-five of them," the mayor said, barely acknowledging the general's heavy-breathing hibernation, as he leaned across the hairy creature. "That figure includes six people we haven't accounted for, yet, but their families have reported them missing, so we assume…"

From the folds of her coat, Vina produced another colored cigarette. The tip of the paper and compressed leaves curdled sensually when she lit it from the candle on the table and, gradually, the white smoke turned into hollow wreathes around the mayor's nervous hands. But none of the names on the little screen, or the thumbnail photos alongside, seemed of any relevance. Jim Kirk saw senseless death almost every month, sometimes numbering in the millions. Out in the frontier just staying alive was more or less a miracle. He had to remember, it was supposed to be different here.

The mayor put the viewer back in his pocket, and smoke drifted across the table into Jim Kirk's face. He stood to go, shaking the general's shoulder, and they stepped out into the side-street to give the transporter a nice, clear signal.

"I hope you find your friend," Vina said, out of nowhere. Smoke billowed subtly from her nostrils, and seemed to cling to the fur around her slender shoulders.

"I hope you find… what you're looking for," Kirk nodded, though he couldn't imagine what that might be, in the end, really.

Their eyes remained locked in a pleasant, yet guarded way, as the stealthy scout ship locked down his coordinates, and Hof's. He didn't say anything, for he knew he was in over his head. From her, there was just that faintly nostalgic, bittersweet little smile. Someday, he supposed, she would be with Chris Pike again. Somehow, he knew it.

He pressed a button inside his communicator, and everything dissolved like champagne bubbles in the night.

"Of course, she knows all about it," Hof declared, disdainfully, a moment later, shaking himself awake. He was plodding down the gangway to his little cabin, as Kirk tried to make sense of the cephalopod's little aquarium settings.

"Of course," Kirk agreed with a sigh, not knowing, but fairly sure the Vulcan could take care of himself, in most cases. The trick was in not going crazy, while not knowing. And then, strangely, he stood in his own cabin doorway with a great sense of exhaustion. And, after a minute, he finally felt his soul re-materialize within his flesh, renewing his sense of purpose. He turned back to the transporter booth.

At the wall panel, he scanned back and forth across the map of the colony below. No Spock, and none of his equipment, and certainly no sign of any native Talosian. After a minute or so, barely able to keep his eyes open, he found Vina exactly where he'd left her, at that little table by herself, on the screen. The old waiter seemed to be standing nearby, in the doorway, as if anxious to close up for the night. If she even allowed him to know it was well-past closing time.

He imagined she was still was waiting for Captain Pike. Or, waiting for a much less sentimental reunion, with a frail little being with a head like a buzzing hornet's nest. Inevitably, the mayor had bustled off to his new, unpleasant duties, and Mrs. Vedder had vanished and was presumed dead. But Mrs. Stamfield, or her through-the-looking-glass husband, wasn't on the casualty list so far, though his recycling plant lay in ruins. At Jim Kirk prayed no relief ship would show up, anytime soon.

If he had to be "isolated, but accessible" so late into the night, where would he be? Where would a keeper have put his first officer, and where the keeper would feel most powerful and protected?

The front of his head was aching as he tapped a food-code into the transporter, for another bucket of fish. A minute later he was up on a set of rungs in the wall of the narrow passageway, hoisting the bucket up, and pouring the slippery silvery approximations of minnows down an air shaft that led into the black water. They spilled down and disappeared. He hoped to do the same with his worries in a few minutes, pouring everything into the dark waters of sleep.

Then, in one of those middle-of-the-night moments, he stumbled back to check the life-form scanner one more time. His feet were still just a bit numb from that phaser blast, right before Vina stepped out of her escape capsule, and his joints still ached from the fighting in bones and sewage. He looked down into the bright readouts and realized that Vina was on the move, toward the space tower.

The screen door was closed, but the main door beyond was wide open. He knocked, and waited. After a minute the little boy, Daniel, showed up again, just inside the nearly darkened house. He didn't say anything, but after looking carefully out beyond the captain, he let him in, and backed up. Daniel kept backing up, silently, all the way into the front room, across the rounded, fringed rug, and all the way back to the hallway that led to the bedrooms, not meeting the Starfleet captain's questioning look.

He could smell real smoke this time, not just the gradual, acrid decay of dried wood. The boy was still back at the other end of the hallway, watching in the dark, as Kirk reached the master bedroom.

"Mr. Stamfield?" He was suddenly struck by the notion that he didn't know what to expect, in more ways than one.

The door seemed to take forever to swing open, or his own sense of alert had revved up his powers of observation, to make everything seem to slow down. He stood before a big expanse of black, charred mattress and machinery where the bed had been, on top of all its circuitry. The ceiling was likewise black above, as if some spontaneous combustion had occurred, and the window across the room was open, facing a handful of homes at this end of town. Gingerly, he lifted the top layers of heavy black char to see if there might be a body underneath.

When he came out into the hall again, a moment later, Daniel had disappeared. James T. Kirk, of the Starship _Enterprise, _walked back into the country kitchen, and slowly opened the back door to the still night. A lone figure sat far out in the grass, on a lawn chair, looking out toward the corn fields and the cliffs and invisible waterfalls in the dark to the north.

"Mrs. Stamfield?"

She didn't turn around, and he softly came up by her side, his hands behind his back, as if she were a busy lieutenant on the bridge of his starship, and he had come up to observe and say hello.

"We call that 'the ring,'" she said, not moving. She seemed to be indicating a pale smear of starry light, like a white spray, frozen just above the horizon to the southeast. "It's really not. They say, maybe in a hundred million years, you know, maybe it'll coalesce into something. Or we could spread it out, as a kind of curiosity. For tourists, I guess," she said, sounding faintly pleased by the notion.

"Take a lot of stretching and pulling," he said, imagining the energy required to turn a bland fact into something beyond casual derision.

"Probably not worth the effort," Mrs. Stamfield said quietly, her voice turning up at the end of the thought, as if having a sudden revelation that freed her, though she remained perfectly still.

"What happened, Mrs. Stamfield?"

"Oh, Luther: he was so upset. Why do men get so upset, and just pretend they don't? He just couldn't bear what happened, and told me—well, it's not like speaking out loud—but he _told _me, he didn't want to do this anymore. Just like that. Can you imagine? It's so strange." She sounded surprised, in spite of their intimate understanding of each other.

"Next time, we'll be ready," Kirk said, though he couldn't believe it, even as the words squeezed up from his throat like rocks.

She nodded, maybe just an angstrom, maybe just out of cool gratitude, and then stood up, slowly smoothing her smock-like blouse in the dark, and looking down at the lawn, as if she hated to step on it, or cause any undue disturbance of any kind.

"Next time," she mumbled, walking back to the dark house, shaking her head. "Next time runs away."

He walked south for about forty-five minutes, and finally looked back at the lights of the colony town, and the last trace of warning lamps, blinking around that hole in the main street. And he wondered what the next day would bring, when the colonists woke up.

A chilly wind whipped at his hair, and a big truck was rushing at him from town, on the dark highway, billowing road dust out behind, and chaff from the last load of grain or corn, weeks ago. Shreds of dried plants whipped away like crooked fingers, flying in the flame-like wake after the big, speeding hauler.

As it grew closer, he could hear the roar, and his mind identified the various engine parts that raced within it. Meantime, the sky and faraway cliffs were all rapidly subtracted from his field of vision in the blue glare of the headlights. And, it seemed without his even turning around, that he could almost see the phosphorescent tower looming behind him, high overhead. His own faint shadow ahead of him, from the light of the tower's glow, was evaporating before the onrushing light of the truck, as his shadow grew sharper behind him. He could hear the turbine-whine of the engine, and the airy roar of speeding truck tires. The honking began, like a roaring barge in the night, or like a freight train, non-stop, as if to dissolve him with the warning howl. The headlights became blinding.

Then, instead of smashing right into him, the man and machine seemed to merge for an impossible second, and the whole truck just swirled through his body with a _whoosh_. He looked down to see that he was somehow off on the shoulder in a neatly-tended stretch of grass. Against his better judgment, he ran toward the glowing tower, as the truck went crashing through a plain white gate beneath it. Somewhere, a dull mechanical bell rattled a warning.

He could definitely see the truck driver, however, slumped over the steering wheel when his rig came to a reckless stop, up on a line of rocks along the drive. But there was no sign of Vina, who had left the sidewalk café so suddenly. Kirk hurried in through an open door into a white entryway, studded with safety readouts on the walls and an old, blockish control panel in the middle of the room.

He was inside the tower, a 100-meter wide structure: a whole processing plant in its own right. Half-way up, he knew the structure changed from gleaming metal, to flexible heavy white fabric, twisting in the stratospheric winds, like the smoke from a candle. And thirty kilometers farther up, out of sight, was a space-dock. He tried to imagine a keeper waiting up there for an unsuspecting ship, but something in him became too angry to see it clearly.

The next chamber was entirely different, a vast warehouse occupied by a series of red, majestic, indoor grain elevators, each one taller, but more narrow, than a starship shuttle-bay; and conveyer belts and vacuum pipes, all seeming to find their way up into the dim tower and the distant reaches of the upper atmosphere, like a core-sample of the greatest empire, reaching up to some exploratory vessel. There seemed to be about a dozen of those mammoth red grain silos crowding upward into the dark, and perhaps five times as many conveyer belts, and hundreds of pipes. And Spock could be tucked away in any of a thousand little nooks or crannies, never to be seen.

He caught a glimpse of a silvery wisp of fabric up above, about fifty feet, on a catwalk between a small observation booth and a network of stairs and ladders. He took one step, and then made himself stop: reasoning that for some reason, the keeper of Saldana now intended for himself to be seen; and for the captain of the _Enterprise_ to climb up after.

"Spock!"

He caught a glimpse of one of the viewscreens by the nearest grain silo, and was briefly distracted. If the screen was right, there was still about thirty tons of grain inside. But the ventilation had been cut off, and neither reading made any sense, months after the harvest. Unless this was what the colony needed itself. But how could the safety blowers be off, and how much explosive grain dust might have built-up inside? It would depend on how long the keeper had been stranded here. It didn't add up—it seemed like less than two days since Talos, and they couldn't have known they'd have Spock so soon...

A deep humming started up around that first silo and, he could see from the monitor, a stirring cycle had begun to keep the grain inside uniformly dry. But, without the blowers, the churning action would only build up more explosive dust, adding to the pressure inside. He tried tapping in a "stop" cycle, but it didn't seem to be working. The great vibration in the tower base continued, with no roar of fans far above. How long could one of these go like this, he wondered, before one or more of them simply blew up? He should know these things, he told himself, but he didn't. Once again, he tried to de-program the propellers inside, each one as big as an ocean liner's.

The humming suddenly seemed to have been multiplied, and harmonized with similar vibrations nearby. He looked around, knowing another great vertical tank had begun its churning action inside. Had he been fooled again, just as when he raised his phaser at Mrs. Vedder, unawares, or when he beamed up without Mr. Spock?

He supposed that if the whole base of the tower blew up, it might keep a stranded Talosian from escaping through the top, to a passing ship, at least for now. Small comfort for him, though, or for Spock, or for anybody sleeping in its path: if the structure were to become totally compromised.

Then he wondered if the vengeful Vina might have triggered the explosive build-up, to take matters into her own hands. But she didn't seem that desperate, yet. Jim Kirk could only hope that when those two adversaries finally came together, and they turned their power on one another, he might begin to see things more clearly. But there was still no sign of her.

He called the Vulcan's name again, barely hearing himself over the roar. He wasn't getting anywhere with the control panel, and said a little prayer that nothing would set off the tanks while he, or Spock, were still inside, or even anywhere near where the structure might collapse.

He tried to imagine how someone as tiny as a keeper might have got Spock here in the first place—if he was here at all. There must have been one or two hypnotized colonists to carry the load of a full-grown adult, let alone to get him this far from the colony in the first place. His eyes began searching, from shadowy crevices between tanks and pipes and gratings in the floor, to the plain floor itself, for some sign of tracks. And then, back to the gratings: those great, long ribs of metal set into the floor for drainage. He could almost hear them ringing sympathetically as the blades roared unseen.

He wove a curving path back and forth across the grates, covering nearly twenty meters along the "boulevard" between the silos. Half-way across the base of the tower, in a moment of sudden awareness of his own vulnerability, he looked up for that glimpse of the keeper; and then, slowly back down, for Vina. And he knew that both of them were watching, somewhere. His natural urge, to appeal for reason, seemed utterly pointless as Vina and the Talosian each thought themselves so much higher in brain development. Though everything they'd done so far suggested quite the opposite.

And then he saw him. Not Spock, but Captain Pike, ravaged by burns that couldn't be put out, twisting in his flesh long after he'd been hauled out of a ruptured crystal chamber: sitting there in his medi-chair, the lights blinking as usual, out in the long path between the storage tanks. As Kirk approached, the image seemed to retreat back toward the front entrance. Then Kirk was standing outside, facing the town, trying to make sense of the crazy night.

And far off, past the crooked-parked truck in the dark, there was another little light coming toward him at what seemed like a leisurely pace. He stepped out onto the entryway, peering into the darkness. In a moment, he could see it was one of the colonists, riding a little motor scooter.

Mrs. Stamfield brought the little bike to a calm stop diagonally in front of the great rig, making a ridiculous picture: as if the tiny scooter had improbably forced the much larger truck off the road with some daredevil maneuver. She popped a white helmet off her head, revealing her country-wife curls, and set it gently on the scooter's seat.

"I wasn't sure you'd make it," Captain Kirk said, as she almost hurried toward him, her hands knitted together like praying.

"Well," she explained as they walked in, "I couldn't leave Daniel. He thinks he's all grown up, but still…"

"This will sound …strange," Kirk said, ushering her into the great warehouse of silos, "but I thought I just saw a ghost."

"Well, now, maybe you did!" Mrs. Stamfield allowed, a little out of breath, as they hurried back into the tower.

"Do you remember my science officer, the Vulcan?"

"Oh, sure," though it seemed she most remembered the shock she felt when Spock zeroed right in on her unusual living arrangements. Former living arrangements. "Was he the ghost?" she asked, perplexed.

"No," Kirk shook his head, and squinted, at this simplest of confusions. "It was his former captain, and Vina—a woman who loved… the captain…"

"Oh," Mrs. Stamfield said, as if that had to make some kind of sense, coming from a starship captain, and all. Kirk paused, seeming strangely lost for a moment.

"Let's go that way," she said with a colonist's simple optimism, putting one hand up thoughtfully to her cheek. "Now you tell me right away if you see any more of your ghosts," she admonished, with perfect sincerity, making him feel like a four year old again, and not at all the bold captain.

"Well, now, what about that," she said, almost right away, suddenly lagging behind and pointing, as Kirk charged ahead. She was bent over what appeared to be a translucent flake of a fingernail. It was small and nearly invisible, on the polished expanse of floor.

He picked it up and saw a bit of dried green blood on the torn inner edge. His head felt instantly hot, but at least he was wide awake now. They looked down a gap between two of the silos to see more ladders and belts and pipes.

"I didn't see it before," he said, holding the fingernail a few centimeters out from his heart. He wouldn't have seen it at all if she hadn't been there, with her strangely organized brain.

"How many fingers does he have, your friend?" Mrs. Stamfield asked, scanning the floor with her eyes, looking for more fingernail crescents.

"Ten," he said, absently, scanning higher and higher up through the pipes and conveyer tubes. He supposed that left nine more twists and turns, and then they'd be looking for pulled teeth after that. He caught another glimpse of that figure in a metallic silvery robe, up in the rafters, looking down and then scurrying out of sight. Kirk raced forward and was half-way up a set of rungs on a wall before he bothered to take his first breath.

He barely heard his own boots clanging, for the pounding in his temples, as he pulled himself up to a catwalk two stories up. Now he thought he saw flashes of silver robes everywhere he looked, out of the corners of his eyes. And he couldn't find the ladder to climb down again. It seemed the only way was up.

Far below now, eight stories down (though Jim Kirk didn't realize it yet) Mrs. Stamfield watched in amazement, and then slowly turned this way and that, her hands clasped over her bosom.

Then she saw them, far in the distance, across the polished plant floor: six diminutive beings in silver robes, lined up like pallbearers on either side of a floating man, the Vulcan.

And in a moment when she felt it more in the soles of her feet, and in the backs of her lungs, Mrs. Stamfield looked up to see one of the far grain silos had blown apart at the top, and a long streamer of fire was twisting up, in and out of black smoke, up into space, within the tower. Then she heard the terrible noise, louder even than all the other steady rumbling, and everything shook like an earthquake.


	5. Chapters 8 and 9

**Chapter Eight **

Jim Kirk threw himself down on the grated catwalk when he felt the thunder, and the heat of the fireball blooming over and over, turning itself inside out, twisting and elongating as it went roaring up past him. The smoke spread around the red silos below like floodwaters, and while he could still see some shifting splinters of the floor far below, he marveled how high he'd climbed without realizing it. The temperature had risen by nearly twenty degrees.

The first gale of fire had soared up like a dragon: a twisting, darkening wisp rising up out of sight through the safety lights. Right after, a strangled burst of flames squeezed up from inside the first ruptured grain tank, a hundred feet away, casting a faint red light across the tops of the other elevators.

It began to prey on his conscience that he _should _know how to de-program the giant propellers inside each grumbling silo, and that anyone who'd grown up in Iowa ought to have toured a similar space-tower at least once, on a field trip from school: certainly, anyone who'd risen up through the ranks of Starfleet, specializing in Engineering—but he hadn't been able to make sense out of the screen readouts, or the controls were somehow just-out-of-reach, even when he stood before them. He began circling the metal catwalk, carefully: looking for a way down; and feeling a stranger to himself as he searched.

He climbed down a narrow ladder to the next catwalk below, and to the next below that, to see if anyone else was in sight: keepers in silver robes, the diamorphic woman of Saldana, or Vina herself. But every scorching sheet of smoke that drifted across him, as the flames glowed below, and the steady din of machinery, each seemed like another illusion to distract him.

He started wondering if a keeper would try taking Spock's phaser, and firing it up at the catwalks around his superior officer—or if there were simpler ways for a Talosian to deal with a man clutching a metal bar, protruding out from a sheer curving wall, six stories up, above a hard concrete slab. As he thought about the possibilities, his descent down a simple metal ladder grew faster, and he tightened his grip—becoming rigid, like a carnival toy, a monkey on a stick, ratcheting its way down with barely a pause.

But when his boots finally tapped down on the vibrating floor again, he looked up through the smoke to see Mr. Spock, as if lying on an invisible gurney, and that crowd of keepers around his motionless form, gliding up on an open elevator platform. They all rose up along a crane-like gantry from behind another silo, disappearing into the smoke.

Finally out of patience, he unclipped his phaser from his belt and fired about thirty meters above the lift, vaporizing the guide-tracks and power lines, even as the silent entourage and the familiar body in their midst raced upwards. Angry bursts of spark and bright purple fire drifted down through the smoke.

And he saw his mother, and he was a stranger to her. She didn't recognize the newly-minted starship captain at all. She seemed happy, but doomed forever to be hidden away in an asylum. Like a country club, these modern facilities came with no stigma attached and no reason to feel sorry or ashamed. Except that she was a different person now, and didn't quite see him as he was, or what he had managed to become. There was no point in saying goodbye: they were both different people now.

His own phaser brushed against his cheekbone, as if one of the keepers was about to blast off the top of his head, by his own hand.

He realized he was staggering as he walked toward the nearest monitor screen at the foot of another great red silo. His fingers were numb like claws, and as he typed, and unfamiliar screens popped up, unbidden. A hidden crevasse beckoned him toward an underground passageway, through trestles like an ancient coal mine, the light from up in the tower dimly creeping down inside. He yearned to chase photons into shadows, toward some deep, dark underground treasure, like space itself.

He realized his mind wasn't supposed to work this way, clouded and distracted, and raised his fists at the open air, taking up the fight. His jaw clenched, and he managed to wheel around, away from the lure of some buried ransom beneath Saldana.

He thought he could see the ghost of the monitor screen again, in his rage, in the depths of that underground trail. And he took the irreversible step of firing his weapon into the instruments, producing the merest imagination of a red blaze. The doubly-ghostly vaporization of the little computer station seemed to reduce the vibration in the air somewhat.

He decided, at least, that meant he really was firing at mechanical objects and not at Spock or one of the others he counted on his side. And, of course, it meant there was no magical tunnel opened in the concrete floor, mysteriously drawing him down inside. He knew he could program the phaser _not _to fire on a Starfleet officer, but didn't know if that might somehow benefit the keepers in this crisis. He staggered through the pounding of noise and another explosion, to find his way to the next silo.

Then he could see Mrs. Stamfield behind a bright shower of sparks, in a corner of steel gantry frames, working the controls on the lift, eventually hitting the right button to bring the keepers back down to earth. But when the pad came down through the smoke, it was empty.

Another terrible explosion shook the tower, as another silo burst its top: crackling open with fire and smoke and shaking the floor as if a giant's door had been slammed in a fury. Great shards of metal plunged down against the floor, jangling Kirk's eardrums down to the nerves inside, and reaching somewhere up into his brain.

That's when he knew they must have a ship waiting up there. They were trying to get away with his first officer. And that only gave him two choices: stop the keepers as quickly as possible, or bring-down the tower, to buy him more time, to keep them from reaching the space dock.

"Vina!" He was shouting into the smoky air, not expecting to see her, but acknowledging that she was there, somewhere.

"Can you see her," he demanded, turning back to the colonial woman. Mrs. Stamfield seemed slightly stunned by his sudden intensity, and he had to remind himself he wasn't on the bridge of the _Enterprise_ anymore. But he was fully aware of the two alternate futures at hand: one, in which they somehow stopped a half dozen keepers at once; and another where they hunted them down separately for months or even longer. As usual, at the beginning of anything, like the tiny oscillations of Quantum mechanics, it seemed things would be much easier to change right away—before a deceptive, new Universe rose up, super-imposed on this one, full of its own new hulking stars and dark matter, controlling all their minds, with a whole new set of unfathomable realities.

The question was: how to separate Spock from his captors?

"Vina!" He turned around savagely, again, shouting into the smoky air. "They have Captain Pike, alive—in Spock! You can have Chris back again—but you have to stop them, first!" His voice seemed lost in the reverberations and, without realizing it, he had fully turned himself around to look up the same sheer wall again.

After waiting an eternity for the blond woman to show herself, up down or center, three more skyscraper-sized tanks exploded overhead, striking like sledgehammers against their ears. In spite of this spectacle, he almost felt jilted—it didn't seem like much of a personal reply. He and Mrs. Stamfield crowded against a narrow, sheltering girder, their forearms instinctively over their heads, watching crags of tumbling metal appearing and disappearing downward through layers of smoke. Down they came, between the silos, smashing upon the floor. Mrs. Stamfield worked her way through the smoke, closer to his side.

And then he realized he could see the air was moving differently, far up in the smoke. Some of the sooty air was whirling and more or less accelerating into a crack in the side, to the open air outside the tower.

"What is it," Mrs. Stamfield said, following his gaze.

"Up there, looks like a… hole—a tear in the shaft." He circled, cautiously, as if he could get an impression of the structural integrity, just by feeling the buzzing in the air. "Must be due to the explosions."

"Maybe they'll be trapped up there," she said, holding the side of her face as though she had an aching tooth.

A body plunged down from far above—black legs and blue torso, falling through fragile nets of smoke. It was Spock, coming to a horrifying stop when he hit the floor. Green blood splattered from the Vulcan mouth. Jim Kirk ventured toward the body, hoping his friend might still be alive.

"No, wait," the woman said, as he seemed compelled to go out in the open again. As they absorbed the sight before them, out in the middle, exposed, Kirk insisted to himself that it was just another illusion.

"They wouldn't give up their hostage so easily," he nodded, catching up to Mrs. Stamfield's reasoning, as Spock's body lay there. As if it had already been forgotten, in the midst of the field of battle.

He raised his phaser up into the air, pointing into the smoke far above, in a sort of half-hearted gesture of vengeance. The convection of smoke was lit by tantalizing flashes of fire from up in the tops of the silos. Then he saw another Mr. Spock falling, and another. They drifted downward, landing in heaps. Then there were four.

He had to look again to see the bodies seemed to be flickering, between images of Spock, and then becoming the keepers themselves.

"What's happening," she said in a low, frightened voice.

"They've lost their… critical mass: of concentration, of… mental domination," Kirk supposed, counting the bodies again. "We saw six keepers before. Now? They must be down to two. They must be fighting against Spock and Vina."

"How does that help," the widow of Saldana asked quietly.

"They can't deceive us anymore," he said, not quite believing it himself, but setting his jaw forward, making up his mind to press onward. They hurried back to the elevator platform and he jammed his hand against a big red button. They rose up into the haze.

"None of this makes any sense," she declared slowly. Her fleshy forearms bounced fearfully against her sides as if she, too, were trying to fly out of a dream, to wake herself in her own bed, a bed she'd already destroyed. Then the two disappeared into thicker smoke, on the rising metal platform.

But the lift groaned to a stop where the tracks had twisted and melted, near where the smoke bulged and swirled and shimmered like a sideways, milky eye, where his phaser had struck five, ten minutes—an hour—before. Beyond that smoky vortex, he reasoned, a hole must be distorting the gray air that otherwise furled up toward the stratosphere. He jumped down a meter or so to the next service ring down, and kept his phaser out in front of him, feeling the presence of Mrs. Stamfield behind him as the catwalk creaked under his boots. Here and there, flashing red lights appeared and disappeared like synchronized Jovian storms in the haze. And the sideways ghostly eye, the smoke pouring out through a hole in the tower, began to disappear, as though the metal hole behind it had suddenly torn wider, and the smoky knot was being sucked outside, faster and faster from the center.

"Come on," he said, taking her by the arm.

"I don't understand any of this," she said, dithering slightly as they squeezed around the catwalk, high above the plant floor.

"We have to block our thoughts. Violent emotions," Kirk recalled, suddenly, stopping as the smoky eye swirled before them.

"Against the Vulcans?"

"No." he said, perhaps a little too emphatically. "What those… Vulcan bodies turned into, down there," he said, indicating the keepers' corpses that must still lie beneath the smoke and flames.

"Oh," she said, though it sounded as if she were only trying to be polite, and still light years from really understanding.

On an impulse, he raised his phaser and fired overhead, toward the smoky "eye." The oval cloud disappeared in a momentary dash of clarity, after the flash of red phaser-light faded, and then more smoke billowed up to fill the twisted scar in the tower's side, as the vortex formed again. He took Mrs. Stamfield's hand and pulled her along. It occurred to him that she was probably better equipped to navigate any mental interference, but it was simply not in him to push her ahead, into the unknown.

And then they were in a large corner office, in some tall building, in a large city that spread beyond the tall windows all around. It had to be an illusion, but it was so one-hundred-percent real that his own mind could not break the spell. The air seemed faintly filtered, pushed through some hidden ventilation; the plants here and there around the room seemed lush and alive; and the light was the harsh lighting of most workplaces, where a kind of forced wakefulness was held in high regard.

A table half-way to the windows had four or five people sitting around it, in fashionable black suits or dresses, seated in chairs on an ocean of blue carpet. And one by one, they seemed to notice him, standing there with the farm woman. But, as he looked down, he realized their clothing, his gold shirt and her frumpy dress, had been somehow replaced with business clothes like the others'.

"Good afternoon, Captain Kirk," a very pleasant man said, half-rising from his black chair and extending a hand. He looked to be about eighty Earth years, eighty modern Earth years, with a fine thick head of silver hair, and a classically styled pin-striped suit and red tie, like a banker. But as Jim Kirk glanced down, and stepped toward the table, the man's hand seemed to fluctuate, as if its owner couldn't quite make up his mind about whether they should be five fingers or six. It felt perfectly normal, though, perfectly welcoming, when it clasped on to his own. Still, Jim Kirk had to steal a glance again, to see if that hand ever got it quite right.

"We are the Imurians, a race no doubt you've not encountered yet," the very pleasant man said, resuming his seat at the small conference room table.

"No, I don't believe we've met," the captain nodded, trying not to sound too wary. On one wall, though, a flat, metallic sculpture resembled an eye, like the smoky one from the burning space tower.

"And you must be Mrs. Stamfield," their host continued, nodding graciously. So sorry to hear about your husband."

"He was just an illusion, I suppose," Mrs. Stamfield said, looking very severe, in her black dress suit. She seemed very chary about things unreal, all of a sudden. There was an uncomfortable little pause, as she seemed unusually formidable, in her strange new clothes. Jim Kirk thought he could hear the wind buffeting against the flat windows outside, in the pale city sunlight.

"We've just become aware of your little problem," the Imurian said, seeming to count up his own fingers at last, as his hands lay spread on the table before him, and the number finally seemed 'just right.' "And," he continued, "well, we've noticed a terrific amount of what we call psi-space, the mental energy each being occupies in himself, or in the space around him, is being filled up at a rather astonishing rate." He smiled, as if it might only be an embarrassing mechanical problem that the captain hadn't quite been aware of. As if such behavior would be highly unlikely in so upstanding a mortal.

"Yes," Kirk said, still skeptical, but not wanting to dismiss any potential help. "We're under attack from a race of telepaths."

"Of course," the Imurian nodded. As if it could have happened to anyone.

Just then the big doors behind the captain and the colonist from Saldana opened with a heavy "click" noise, and swung open slowly, to allow in a coffee cart, which seemed to be self-controlled. It whirred in to the room, coming to a stop just between the Imurian leader and the captain.

"I should offer you some refreshment," the gentleman insisted.

"No, that's quite all right."

"Well, now," the Imurian nodded. "How do you think we should deal with this problem, then?"

Kirk stared back at Mrs. Stamfield, as if he couldn't believe any of this, from the first instant right up to now. She looked worried, but remained silent.

"I think my own people have fallen a few steps behind, sir." And, that was the honest truth. "We've allowed these beings out into the galaxy, they've begun breaking up our food chain. And they've kidnapped my first officer as a lure, to capture the only woman who might know enough to stop them." He was interpolating, of course, what little he knew, with what General Hof had surmised.

"Won't you sit down, Captain? I'm sure you're tired, and would like to rest." After years of dealing with hard-edged Starfleet officers, and incomprehensible aliens, he found all this charm directed at him very strange, and even unattractive.

As a sort of compromise, Kirk stepped away from the windows, and put his hands on the back of an empty chair across from their host. He could see now, that the work-pads of the men and women at the table also were embossed with the stylized eye-pattern. Finally, after a moment, the Imurian spoke up again, encouragingly.

"We'd really like to know how you'd handle such a problem, yourself, Captain."

"I'm sure you would," Kirk said, very flatly. His phaser was out, in his hand, and pointed directly at the other man's head.

"Really, Captain," the gentleman smiled. "You know we must be every bit as powerful as the people you seek to… whatever it is, you'd like to do with them. There's no need for that. Please calm down."

"Let's say," the captain began, sounding as though he was amused to discuss the idea, "I had some kind of a plan to rein-in the Talosian keepers. Let's say… one of their former prisoners managed an escape and was taking them out, one at a time, from the other end. You'd know all about it, as telepaths, yourselves."

"Oh," the Imurian smiled, shaking his head, though it created a slight blurring-effect. "We don't all operate on the same frequencies, or band-width, as you might say. We just want to make sure our own… territory… is not at risk, in all of this."

"And now you want me to tell you all my strategies. If I had any."

"You corporeals have such a different approach. It interests us. So… visceral." Some of the others at the table seemed to share a private joke, in their glances, back and forth, as if they'd seen humanity at its worst, already.

"I don't suppose you have any ability to track the locations of my adversaries?" Kirk walked toward the bank of office windows facing the afternoon light.

"I'm afraid we don't really occupy space in the same terms you're accustomed to, Captain."

"Neither do we, in warp drive," Kirk shrugged. So far, he hadn't really seen anything to substantiate any of the Imurian claims.

"Of course. Each of us, in our own way, is a trans-dimensional, until the day we die," the alien said, in a way that Kirk found pleasant, but vaguely condescending. And when he turned back to face them, he found they were all waiting patiently for him to speak.

"You're asking me what my next move is, against the keepers?"

Silence.

"My first responsibility is to my mission, and then to my crew. In this case, that's my first officer, Mr. Spock, who's gone missing. My next responsibility is to my passengers, to get them home safely." He became aware that he was nearly shouting, in the midst of this bizarre diversion. Mrs. Stamfield was still standing, almost huddled, arms tight against her side, between the meeting room door, and the coffee cart, as if she was anxious to leave. Kirk's voice became hushed, and he turned to face the strangely familiar city, pieced together out of his own memories, he supposed.

"I'm going to find a weapon. Something the keepers can't fight against: something that's already out there. Some weakness they've… overlooked."

"While they cut off your food supplies?" The Imurian grew increasingly grave. "While they pit your people, one against the other? Or dozens, or millions of them in meaningless wars?"

"What do you suggest?" Kirk asked, unwilling to admit any defeat. "On Omicron Ceti III, we used a high frequency sonic beam, to create antagonism among the locals. To break a spell of euphoria. I'm not sure that would help, in this case."

"Your own kind seems to be thoroughly antagonized, already," one of the other Imurians said, without looking up from her work-pad, seeming to refer to Kirk's angry tone, or the mobs on Saldana.

"For the amusement of races like your own," Kirk couldn't keep from saying, as he glowered out the window, at what seemed to be New York in the early fall, around 1965 or so, he guessed.

"You have no idea about us, or our goals, Captain," the senior alien said, as if giving him some very fatherly advice.

"No. But I've seen enough higher beings to know when I'm being led around in circles."

"Really, Captain, perhaps we can help. We have no common cause with the keepers."

"And, I just tell you all my plans."

The Imurian shrugged, as if there were nothing else he could say beyond an implicit show of sincerity.

"Of course," the captain sighed, seeming to wear out. "You could probably read them in my own mind." But there was only a strange silence, which gave him pause to think: perhaps they couldn't. Perhaps they really were on a different wavelength, a different 'bandwidth,' from the telepaths he had known. The metal "eye" sculpture, like the smoke vortex from the grain tower, gleamed at him from the right, near the office doors. And they claimed they wanted advice from him.

"I suppose I could enlist your help, for one thing," Kirk said, walking away, up the length of the windows and the buildings beyond. "If, as you say, you're worried about your own territory."

"There is a solution to your problem," the spokesman for the aliens said, looking down, and then up, apologetically. "But I rather doubt you'd be willing to pay the price." He almost looked sad for Kirk.

But before the Imurian could elaborate, the floor began to shake violently, as some invisible beam of power split the room, in a jagged line, as if it were only a sheaf of papers being ripped in half, with over-sized confetti tumbling every which-way, and floor and ceiling shredding with a rough low growl. The room tore open, and the table and the Imurians around it were shaken into smaller and smaller wavelengths, till they had vanished entirely, into the vibrating air.

The seemingly undetectable disruptor beam (for that was what it was most like, in effect) took another swipe across the perpendicular, and the room was split again, like a shipwreck in some unknown storm. He threw himself toward Mrs. Stamfield, and they haphazardly made their way to the big doors, though any other direction would have certainly got them out even faster—to what, though?

He barely had time to look over his shoulder as they dove through the doors, back at what suddenly seemed like a ruined Valhalla, brought down without warning by some rancorous underworld. Or, some rank and file members of some neglected church, tearing their gods to pieces in frustration. He only wished it could happen so easily to the keepers. Now, it seemed, he and the woman of Saldana II were lost in their own particular space.

Was this the fate of all super-beings, who sat too long on their heavenly thrones? And what was the price the Imurian said Kirk would never be willing to pay, to save everything he knew? He and Mrs. Stamfield went ricocheting down an elegant office corridor as it broke free of the rest of its New York moorings, rolling end-over-end through an abyss of writhing cliffs: chewing everything before the building vanished completely in the rough rock. It was impossible to tell if they were falling or rising.

Then they crashed down onto the catwalk, and the warning lights still pulsed around him. After a second, the two crawled forward slowly, and the eye above them shut in a tight slit as smoke raced faster outside.

Finally, Kirk saw them: Spock, looking asleep, propped up against the bulkhead of the tower, on the catwalk ahead; and Vina with her arms wrapped around his shoulders and his head, holding it up, almost lovingly. In a second, she looked up and saw him approaching, and she vanished along with his first officer.

And that's when he knew he was in real trouble: for what human can ever completely surrender the love they had for someone else, to cold, neglectful death? And what gods would they endure to keep that love alive?

"Spock!" he called again, toward the empty spot where he'd been a second ago. "A price too high for me to pay! That's the answer—what does it mean? Spock!"

But he was alone now, with the farm woman, as another tank exploded far below.

**Chapter Nine**

**CAPTAIN'S LOG: Star-Date 1092.47**

_We've beamed down to Beta-Drake II, an uninhabited world at the end of this star cluster, as we complete our survey of the stellar region. In the landing party are Dr. Boyce, xeno-biologist Freeman, Lt. Spock, and ensigns Rawley and Chan. _

"Materialization complete," the young Mr. Spock said into his communicator. Captain Pike and the other members of the landing party stepped out from their transport-pattern, into a sunny meadow.

"Acknowledged," Number One replied, from up on the _Enterprise_, and the Vulcan closed the device. Now, he turned and walked out into the open, like the others: the ship's doctor, kindly and gray-haired, the savagely beautiful Lt. Freeman, and the two ensigns. The younger team members each had their tricorder out, like flashlights on a bright and cloudless day, and the tall grass rustled before them, as their boots threaded the flat land between green mountains.

"We could have come here first," Dr. Boyce smiled, taking it all in, looking around, while the others stared into their tricorders. "You could have dropped me off, and reported me 'missing in action.' For a week or so, anyway."

"Sorry, Phil," Pike said, seemingly on the lookout for a hungry lioness in the brush. "The minute you lose your doctor, somebody always ends up in a wheelchair."

"You've got four more up there, just as good as I am. Every one of them younger and faster than I am," Boyce chuckled, as Pike sniffed the air, like an apex predator himself.

"But none so handsome as you, Doctor," Lt. Freeman called, across the grass, billowing in the breeze.

"Why, thank you, Lieutenant," Boyce said, a twinkle in his eye.

"Don't listen to her, Doctor, she spends all her time surrounded by super-intelligent… reptiles," Pike said, his steely eyes twinkling.

"Well, at least I can pretend I'm super-intelligent," Boyce sighed, glancing down. And then he saw the sign they had not been first to this idyllic world.

In spite of everything, or because of everything (the sun, the breeze, the teasing, beautiful woman and the brave captain) the old doctor knelt down to peer at a glinting piece of metal, partially covered by the dirt. He almost didn't reach out to take it from the earth, this faraway earth, in the midst of this faraway family. But his old hand finally did reach out, like a child's, at last. The wind whipped casually at his silvery hair.

There was an explosion that seemed to come out of nowhere. Chris Pike turned to look, and everyone began picking their way toward the chief medical officer of the USS _Enterprise_, hidden in the grass now, and the echo, the epic ghost of the blast, rolled back from the mountains like thunder.

"He never touched it," Pike declared, an hour later, at a desktop monitor in sickbay. And, to the knot of crewmen also watching the playback of the landing party's, from a zoom-pic up on the _Enterprise_, it sounded like the captain was already addressing a cold board of inquiry.

But he could feel the warmth of Inez Freeman next to him, almost as if she were trying to calm him down by standing so close. Dr. Boyce lay in the wardroom, unconscious, through the office door, somewhere near death. And after an hour's work, Dr. Hershberg looked tired and a little detached as he came in to join the officers, who'd come back from Beta-Drake so soon.

"Zoom in closer," Pike ordered, and the computer screen on the doctor's own desk showed the chief medical officer kneeling in the grass, right before the blast, from a vantage point hundreds of miles up in the sky. His gnarled old fingers brushed the grass apart, as he leaned down a little closer to the slightest glint in the sunlight.

"What is it, Freeman," the captain said, his voice growing quieter as they all leaned in to see, right before the instant when a bit of inert metal turned into a solar flare.

"Freeze it," she said, putting one hand on the desk, and leaning in the closest of all.

"Well," she said, focusing all her attention on the little metallic shape, even as Pike's square jaw leaned down over her shoulder. "Most of it's hidden, but it looks like a fuse, disguised as a sort of Eska fighter-god symbol, from beyond the Arachnid nebula."

"Hell of a long way for the Eska to have come, a hundred thousand years ago, just to leave their calling card," the captain said, shaking his head. "Before they disappeared altogether."

"Well, yes Captain, but that's only a first inspection," she said very politely, turning so their chins almost touched, her soft African skin glowing against his own slight stubble.

"Keep trying" he said, looking pensive. "Send down an armored science team, I want a look at one of those devices," he added, grimly. He pulled away and walked quietly into the wardroom. And, as she backed-out of the circle of officers around the desk, Inez Freeman stole a quick glance at the Captain: standing over the old doctor, motionless on the gurney.

Then, as if possessed by an entirely different woman, she followed into the wardroom, standing beside him at the foot of the bed. Dr. Hershberg worked quietly on the other side of the elaborate stretcher, holding a screen-pad out over his wounded senior colleague.

"He's going to be all right," she said, almost too quietly for the attending physician to hear. Pike seemed to nod, very slightly.

But "Get a move on, Lieutenant," was all he could say. Looking at him, she somehow knew he felt doubly ashamed—not just for how badly he felt about this particular casualty, under his command, but how much less all the others suddenly seemed to mean in comparison.

"Aye, sir," she nodded. Her feet seemed to know the way back to the transporter room, where a science team was suiting up, and Lt. Spock waiting to toss her a set of anti-blast pads from a rolling rack. As if she'd done it a hundred times, she shimmied into the stiff leggings and heavy, padded sleeves, before two of the quartermasters clamped head and body padding down on her. They all looked like they were going out on a space walk, or to umpire a particularly vicious sporting event, climbing up onto the transporter dais with their tricorders dangling from heavy gloved hands.

Freeman couldn't exactly say why, but she felt like this investigation was especially urgent to her, for some reason. Vina, who saw it all through the lieutenant's eyes, knew very well but could not say. And at least for a second, as the ship dissolved away, Freeman didn't have to try to figure it out.

Now, in their blast suits, they were wary aliens in that paradise: stomping around in the same glorious meadow. One by one, they clumsily drew equipment out of their long pockets, extending metal arms till each crewman seemed to be carrying fireplace tongs and shovels, in the grass that blew around like an emerald lake.

"Over here," Spock said quietly, in her padded helmet. He was kneeling down, holding the scanner all the way out from his body, over an innocuous patch of land. His ramrod posture seemed to defy the heavy ribs and panels of his protective gear. Two of the others approached slowly, half crouched-over, the dreamy sun glinting on their visors as they tried to spot the next device.

There on the tricorder in his gloved hand, she could see a seemingly random set of signals from all around them in the meadow, like the nerve impulses inside a brain, as the remaining explosives seemed to be in constant communication with one another. They watched the pattern for a moment, looking for any sign of familiarity. Finally, Spock tapped the screen along the bottom edge, and the tricorder began comparing the invisible energy bursts to any known system of signaling.

"You know what that looks like," she muttered, as they knelt there, not really able to see the device a meter in front of them, but watching the little screen carefully.

"Indeed," the Vulcan admitted. "But the strict mathematics do not correspond."

"The hell with that," she said, standing up, and taking a quick look around, for safety.

"Let's just beam it up into the computer," one of the others in the team protested, standing back. Till now, he'd been crouching over the other two, reading the screen.

"You saw what it did to Dr. Boyce," Freeman said, "what do you think it'd do to the ship?"

"It couldn't be Eska," another science officer insisted, joining them now as they all stood, staring into the waving patch of grass. Word had got around just that fast, and all the science officers were following up on her first guess, trying to sound like even greater experts, all of a sudden.

Just like that, she whipped off her blast helmet, revealing that great cloud of dark brown hair, and tossed the protective headgear in front of them as if it were a game of horseshoes. There was about a second and a half of calm after the empty helmet collapsed over an unremarkable little spot in the valley.

Then, as if provoked to great wrath, ten meters away, then six, and then twenty meters, and all around, ten distinct explosions shoved them this way and that, in the midst of the beautiful mountains. Geysers of flame rolled upward, as the devices exploded at different spots in the grass. But the one she'd covered up with her helmet sat perfectly silent. Once the dirt stopped raining down on them, the Vulcan, too, removed his headgear.

"I believe we have our sample," he said, sounding pleased.

Against any doubts, they beamed the explosive device up into the computer, where it was spread out into vast, two-dimensional equations and eventually resolved into schematics. Back on board, Spock and Freeman took turns staring down into the computer readout of the numbers and angles and diagrams, on the bridge of the starship, as the captain looked on from the railing.

"Well, that part looks totally different," she said, folding her arms in mild irritation.

"Indeed. It bears the strongest resemblance to the variable nano-lever of the Driff."

"You've got me there, Mr. Spock," Freeman laughed, never having studied the equally extinct Driff technology. They looked for another moment, until she spoke again. "It's like some mish-mash of all these different, lost techno-histories."

"Indeed. It could be a counterfeit; a polyglot."

"Why would anyone want to hide their claim on a planet?" Captain Pike wondered, looking down in memory of his injured friend.

Both the lieutenants turned to look at Pike, and then off over his shoulder, as if they were working on an answer. Beta-Drake II spun very slowly beneath them on the big viewscreen.

"I want a detailed probe of the entire planet," the captain said, stepping up to the seat of command, and easing into it, as he scrutinized the glowing spheroid on the screen. "Someone was here, and didn't want us to know. And didn't want us to stay."

"Aye, Captain, full scan in progress," Freeman said, as Spock began pressing commands into the science station computer.

"It's somebody who doesn't belong here, but doesn't have any plans of leaving," was all Pike could think of to say. Then, he noticed both Spock and Freeman seemed to be running out of baby names for their new pet, just sort of shuffling the explosive device around on the overhead screen, as if holding a gem up to the light, and marveling at its structure.

"Or," Freeman shrugged mysteriously, "it's left by someone who's claimed the planet, but just doesn't want the bother." She had to try very hard not to wink, as the captain pondered the thought.

"Why don't we go back down there," he said, at last.

"Full-planet scan will not be complete for seven hours, sixteen minutes, fourteen seconds, Captain," Number One, the ship's first officer, observed from the helm.

"I'm sure we'll be careful," Pike nodded. "Just you, Freeman," he said, though Spock had already taken a step toward the turbolift. "I want you up here on that scan, Mr. Spock."

In another five minutes, the two were back on Beta-Drake II, on an entirely different continent, though in an equally temperate zone: Freeman walking out ahead of the captain, with the whirring of her tricorder sweeping back and forth over the ground on a high ridge above a quiet, steady-rushing sea.

"So," the captain said, daring to pick a tiny flower out of the grass, along the rocky cliff, "what other civilizations seemed to have put their stamp on that device, Lieutenant?"

She came to a halt, and checked her tricorder files before answering in earnest. It took a few seconds, and Captain Pike found himself standing right next to her, also peering into the little screen.

"Well, besides my Eska fighting god, and Mr. Spock's little Driff 'nano-lever,' there were, uh," she shook her head, seeming distracted, possibly by the height above the crashing waves, and the nearness of the sky. Hidden inside her, or overlaid against Freeman's own soul, Vina suddenly ached in ways and places she never had before. There was none of the ruined captive in him now, and nowhere near as much suspicion, as in his final years.

"There were what, Lieutenant?" He was still looking into her tricorder readout.

"Sorry, sir. There were at least four other little 'disguises' on it, as you see—as you see here. Probably more," she said, her face growing warm. She tried to hand the scanner off to the handsome captain, but he wouldn't take it, seeming to prefer to look over her shoulder. Finally, he reached around and tapped the little screen, and his arm lined-up along-side hers. For a second, absurdly, it almost seemed like they were about to go ice-skating off the edge of the cliff together, her arm out across him, as if he might take her by the waist and sweep them both out into the sky, like blue ice.

"That's interesting," he nodded. "That looks like the diburnium electrostatic finish on…" but their cheeks had got too close, and his lips were brushing hers; and now they stood wound-up in each other, high above the alien beach and foam and tide pools.

It was strangely impossible now, to tell if it was day or night, as they sank down to their knees and onto the rushing grass. Lying together, it was as if they were two fish out of water, gasping together for the ocean.

And, just that suddenly, there was a coolness, a slight distance, and Vina could no longer feel Lt. Freeman's impossible excitement, that engulfed her just a fraction ago.

"I'm very worried for Saldana, and for Captain Kirk," Captain Pike seemed to be saying, perfectly calmly and rationally, as they clung together in the brush, hidden from the glare of the sun. But his voice had the unmistakable rhythm of Vulcan speech, the way they often sounded, as if they had learned Earth English by breezing through the entire works of William Shakespeare in a single sitting: ending up with that same clip-clop of steady intensity. "I'm _ve_ry _wor_ried _for_ Sal_dan_a."

"What's that?" she said, astonished.

"Captain Kirk must have your help, to fight against the keepers." It seemed to be Chris Pike speaking, but his lips weren't moving, though his face implored her.

"Spock!" Vina shouted, in anguish and frustration.

"We can continue on, like this, but first we have our duty," the thought came, seemingly out of Pike's eyes, directly into hers—or Inez Freeman's. But now she couldn't hear the waves rushing down against the cliffs anymore, or feel the grass brushing against her legs. The illusion was fading.

She drew up, and Inez came up with her, crouching on the high edge of the continent. The sky behind her seemed to grow closer, then farther: as flying sea birds grew large and then suddenly small, as the dream became muddled.

"They made me hate who I was—for what was in my heart! Every lovemaking, every kindness, was stopped or started for their own purposes. You're no better than they!"

"You can still have that love," the image of Chris Pike seemed to think at her, in perfect rhythm, as he reached out, reassuringly. "But there is a greater need at hand."

Lt. Freeman seemed frozen there, along the grassy cliff, and the sound of the ocean might have been Vina's own simmering annoyance. Captain Pike seemed to rise to a kneeling position, almost like a suitor to propose.

"They made me hate my body—they made me hate my soul—things to amuse them. I won't be toyed with, anymore!" She seemed horrified and furious, all at the same time, and finally the young black lieutenant stood, half-crouching, as if she might fly away with the gulls. Any passer-by would have thought the two Starfleet officers were about to engage in silent, hand-to-hand combat.

"You can have him back, the way it was. Just help James Kirk, back on Saldana."

"And what about the next time?" The old distrust of the Universe was creeping back into her voice, and thoughts. And now the men of the _Enterprise _were trapping her, just as she had once helped in trapping them.

"Captain Pike would pay- _any_ price- for your freedom," Spock thought to her, switching to the same emphatic rhythm of speech he'd heard dozens of times from Jim Kirk, though he spoke from behind the mask of Pike himself. "Why should the rest of the galaxy have to pay as well?"

"Because everyone loves a good story," she sneered, and it was even visible now, years earlier, on Freeman's lovely face: a bitter grimace that remembered too much. The man and woman now circled high above the crashing waves. Now Spock, or Pike, stood on the very edge, as she stared back.

"I believe you refer," Spock countered, with perfect calm, as the wind whipped at their uniforms, "to the construct of the 'novelized' human mind: where every chance encounter, and every thoughtless action against you, is woven into a story, or fabric that must, in the end, become a twisted cord to strangle its own author."

Finally, as if struggling out of a nightmare, she threw up Freeman's arms: bent and waving, as if protecting herself from an unseen attack. That, and the image of Chris Pike, and the knowledge of what he did for her, forced her to surrender her outrage for now. Her arms, blue velveteen between slender black fists, slowly came down. Her fists relaxed like spring leaves, revealing nearly pink palms like flowers.

But there was Jim Kirk, lashed on to a brutish wooden throne, or (on closer inspection) an old 1920's electric chair, howling in madness as the two remaining keepers swept him up the height of the elevator and up toward orbit. Clouds of fire spun higher on either side, chasing and passing, and smoke stained his face, despite a rain of sweat. Ms. Stamfield was gone, disappeared back into the smoke somewhere.

"Can you shoot out the lift?" Vina shouted to Spock, over the roar of fire and explosions. They were ten, fifteen levels below now, and losing sight of him.

"Too far," the Vulcan commander shouted back, though they were barely a half-meter apart. Slowly his phaser came up, as he tried to locate the exact center of the tower, miles overhead. It was too ridiculous and too dangerous a chance to take, so he hesitated. There was no way to guarantee the captain's safety if he fired.

"Back to the ship," he said, now sure he had been contaminated himself, somehow—the sight of the electric chair seemed to prove that. Spock looked down through the smoke for some other sign of help.

"But you can't just abandon a whole planet to madness and regret!" she said, sounding like a much younger woman, all of a sudden.

"This part of the Federation is dissolving," Spock said, ruefully. "We must attempt to contain the 'dissolving agent' by preventing them from leaving orbit. And, they are already quite close to internal space-vacuum now," he added, as they glimmered away in golden swarms of light, at the touch of a button on his communicator.

"But you can't just give up!" she insisted, as if some of the idealism of Inez Freeman had somehow rubbed off on her. They stepped off the pads in the scout ship again.

"I shall file a complete report. Sociologists will be sent out, and order will be reconstituted." There was no other way, he felt certain, in the long run. A planet like this could survive for a few years without outside help, but could hardly manage its own resources, or defend against attackers, for very long. He saw the galaxy receding into a past of isolation and willfulness—as men retreated into their own pride and dreams and fears. It could take months, or longer, to restore them as integrated members of their community—if it wasn't too late, already.

Now she stood over him up in the cockpit as he scanned for nearby ships that might be tricked into moving their enemy—and the captain—across space, to the next set of victims. Farther behind, down the gangway, General Hof peered out of his cabin warily.

"What are you doing," she said, leaning forward as Spock turned the ship, and the great expanse of Saldana II seemed to fly around to the starboard side.

"I am attempting to isolate the captain's life-reading," he said, utterly absorbed in the instrumentation and the readouts and the tiniest glimpse of the space dock in orbit below. "However," the Vulcan said after a moment of touching one light-panel after another, in a hand-entered process that seemed to slow down dramatically, "it does not appear he is currently in the high atmosphere, as his earlier progress had seemed to indicate."

"You know what you have to do," the voice of the Tellarite grunted, now close behind them. Hof straightened his back and threw out his furry belly, as if assuming command.

"Chop it off! Chop off the head of the expansion!" the general demanded, shaking his forepaw at the space elevator below. He made it sound like a dandelion, about to bloom with white seedlings, about to be spread out upon the wind.

"I am aware of my options, General," Spock said, dismissively, still intent on the computer readings.

"The general's right," Vina said slowly, sounding surprised to admit it. Apparently both the former captives believed the other to be quite mad, but each knew how they'd got there. It hardly made for a credible majority of opinion, though, as neither could be counted as logical creatures, under the best of circumstances, without qualified psychometric analysis. He turned and started work on another panel on the control board, below the wide rectangular portals.

The ship spiraled downward in orbit until they were barely a kilometer above the darkened fields, and barely two kilometers from the tower itself. It was still the middle of the night, but a hundred colonists had come out, after the explosions, watching from beyond the perimeter fencing, as the smoke pour out against the stars.

"Still no readings?" Hof was becoming quite at home in the cockpit.

"No."

"You cannot deny your nature, Vulcan!" The Tellarite had grown irritated beyond any containment at the delay.

But as the ship sat in mid-air, before the tower, Spock suddenly realized he would soon be remembered as the officer who broke the Federation into a thousand little pieces, just as he was about to snip the elevator in half, separating the planet from its orbiting dock. The dim gray tube of metal stretched invitingly, gradually undulating like a swan's neck, into the sky.

"It might come down on its own," Vina said, after some serious thought, seeing the smoke pouring out in the dark.

"You could give it… just a little push," Hof said, urging him with a feral whisper.

Suddenly, Spock's hands went into action on the control panel, and they could hear the deep hum of the warp engines overhead, across the cowl-wing of the ship.

"What are you doing? Are you insane?" Vina cried, for even she knew the danger of warping space so deep inside a gravity-well. This close to a planet's surface, the results would be devastating, especially for them. But they lingered in place for several moments, as Spock adjusted the engines' focus to an extremely nearby destination.

"Ha!" Hof nodded in approval. "A warp-knife," he grunted. "Excellent."

This great nodding, and folding of arms (over an increasingly large belly) was met with suspicion by the Earth woman.

"If you snap it in half, by whatever means you please, there's a danger to the people below right now, and to the colony, itself." It was an unlikely proclamation of concern for innocents, from a woman who'd had very little, till her sudden reunion with Chris. Exposure to Lt. Freeman also seemed to have had a pronounced, salutary effect. Even General Hof found himself turning to look at the strangely beautiful Vina, made even moreso by her expression of worry.

"My calculations indicate the wind and the upper stages of the orbiting platform will carry most of the wreckage many hundreds of kilometers away, before the majority of it comes down to the surface," Spock said, "in a line approximately along this region," he said, drawing an imaginary field of wreckage off toward the horizon, beyond the portal windows. "Further, I would note that phasers or photon torpedoes would indisputably cause much greater harm to the assembled crowds."

"What makes you think you can stop them here?" Vina persisted.

"One must remember that this structure is _not _designed for human transport. At that point, there," Spock said, pointing to a more flexible section of the thin tower, "the space elevator becomes, essentially, a suction chute: incorporating the vacuum of space, eleven point four three six kilometers up at the top of the structure, through the process of partial pressure."

"Yes," Vina nodded, being perfectly well-acquainted with the way most plants drew moisture from underground, up to their highest leaves.

"It is therefore logical to assume that the keepers and, almost certainly, the captain, are somewhere in the region below."

"You're saying they'd take quite a beating, going up like tons of loose grain," Hof clarified.

"I am saying it would be fatal, sir, even with a great deal of protective covering." He made a few adjustments to the controls, and felt Vina behind him, standing up straight, after leaning on the big padded chair for support. She drew a fearful breath.

Then, the ship leapt backwards, or the tower and the colony around it leapt forwards, it was impossible to tell, with the inertial dampeners that kicked-in along with the idling warp engines. Spock was preparing to make his "cut" through the tower, re-focusing the engines as a brutal, blunt weapon. The ship tilted nose-up, slightly, and the engines roared to life, as the cockpit's alarm blared suddenly around them.

"There," Vina said, looking at a screen on the panel showing a new, blinking green light projected up on a schematic view of the horizon ahead of them. Instantly, Mr. Spock drew his hands away from the instruments. Now he was up, in a second, and squeezing between the two former captives of Talos IV, on his way to the transporter booth.

When Vina and Hof clambered down after him, they found the Vulcan zipping up a dark green, padded explorer suit. He clipped on a helmet, and stepped into the beaming chamber.


	6. Chapters 10 and 11

**Chapter Ten**

Vina may have been correct, Spock realized, as he materialized on a shaky gantry, high up in the elevator to the sky. The rigid section of the tower swayed as the flexible sections above jerked against the pull of the atmosphere farther up in the jet-stream, and part of the lattice-work of ladders and service platforms had fallen away below, in the fire or from the phasers in the first struggle. A big blow-hatch immediately overhead was shut against the permanent vacuum in the upper reaches, but he couldn't see the keepers, or the captain around him, as he'd anticipated. A projected image on the inside of his face-plate showed a schematic of the view through the smoke.

The captain's life-reading had been right here, within arm's reach a few minutes before; and now Spock stared carefully, as if blinded by an impenetrable smoke of an entirely different kind. Then he turned his eyes up to the vacuum hatch. He drew a coiled rope from his back-pack and hooked it to the railing. The hatch seemed to tremble continuously against the permanent vacuum above.

For a moment, his hand rested on a manual hatch release, and he knew that everything would be upside-down after this: that instead of keepers plunging down to their deaths from buildings or scaffoldings or what have you, he faced the imminent prospect of falling up, into the bottomless depths of space, if anything should go wrong.

The rest of these precious seconds he spent calculating the pressure differential between the two sides of the big hatch overhead, knowing that smoke and all manner of debris would go roaring past, as the hatch opened and the tower became a needle stuck deep inside the balloon of the atmosphere.

Unspooling his line like a mountain-climber, he walked around the grating to the nearest grain tube, hidden behind the wall of the wide central core. The flashing red lights still pulsed in dizzying lines for a kilometer down below, into the haze. But there was no sign of other life, as he searched one access tube after another with his tricorder. The ultra-thin safety rope spooled out, and around and around, like thread from a bobbin. He paused for a moment, listening to his own breathing in his helmet. He programmed the phaser against firing on a fellow officer, with a few taps on a small screen on top.

Someone moved down below, furtively, and he raised his weapon. The information on his visor was not conclusive but, on a sudden, human impulse he jumped over the railing and plummeted downward, tethered to the upper catwalks by the line. It whirred on his shoulder as the rope unspooled, and down he went.

When he could see the spot that had drawn his attention, he pointed and fired, but no beam leapt out of the muzzle. Clearly, this meant he was firing at—or too close to—the captain himself. He spun and flipped across another railing, landing on his back. The sound of the secure-line _winging _against the upper rails gradually merged with the sound of the fire below.

He was suddenly in the more vulnerable position now, in terms of enemy fire, but worked his way up one flight, and then another. And, by an interesting coincidence, he knew (almost exactly) where the captain had been, sixteen point seven three one seconds earlier.

Back on the ship, Vina lay crouched against the aquarium wall, as the cephalopod writhed on the other side. General Hof could barely bring himself to watch the sight of a woman he knew to be quite insane, and a creature so vastly different from anything he knew on his own home world, curling its boneless black arms against the transparency like a mysterious aura, seeming to swallow up the equally unfathomable woman.

The tentacles shifted around her, first like a dark paisley, and then like squirming exclamation points that couldn't help becoming question marks after a moment or two, in an embrace that was mighty and yet tender. Vina curled up, too: into a ball on the gangway floor, still in contact with the frozen glass, between her and the churning, beseeching arms that seemed to try to lift her up again from her wretched pose. It was as if she needed someone to share her sorrow with, even as the other creature tried to share something totally alien. And then, perhaps realizing that she was being watched, Vina half-rose.

"You see, General," she said, turning and looking over her shoulder at last, "I'm not as young as I seem." She struggled to her feet, rising up against the winding tentacles and her own reflection, sliding up the glass till she seemed like a ballerina in a badly shredded black leotard. She was not attractive to him, as a Tellarite, but surprisingly lithe and healthy for someone who'd been in a dank prison cell for decades.

"Yes," Hof said, at last, and bitterly. "Like most beauties, you are quite old on the inside."

One by one, the tentacles disappeared into the dark water behind her, and she drew a strand of blond hair from her face as she passed him, on her way up to the cockpit. In a moment, she seated herself in the large padded chair that Spock had used. Out of a long-out-of-use habit, she reached into the cushions and pulled out harness straps, clicking them across her chest.

She spread her arms out over the Duotronic controls, closing her eyes like a piano virtuoso for a moment, and tapped the log-in code for Captain Christopher Pike. Her only regret at the moment was the whiteness of her arms, compared to Inez Freeman's. Soon though, she knew they would be one again, and she with Chris.

Spock tapped the "re-wind" command inside his helmet, and swung up across the tower railings, rising three long flights all at once, and landing—impossibly—before a firing squad for violating the quarantine on Talos IV, two point seven standard years ago. It was as if all the intervening months and explorations and contacts and adventures had dried up to an instant of worry, and now—

He fired randomly, for he felt sure he still had his phaser in his gloved hand. Theoretically, even if it were aimed at his own body, or at the captain's, the weapon would sense that and go dead. A horrendous flash meant the end of the line, disgraced in death before a firing squad, or…

He reached out and scooped up what his mind told him was left, on this melting gantry as it swung out over the concrete floor, over a thousand meters below. And then the entire tower began to shake and tilt, though the entire universe at the moment seemed comprised of this one great tube. Now it was going sideways, like the Imurian hallway Captain Kirk had raced down an hour before, shaking everything with a terrible groan of metal. Spock now held the captain in one arm, and the rope in the other, and they went rolling across the great curving side, hopping cross-wise as the tower began to fall. Then they hurtled over one of the railings and onto another catwalk, with Spock re-winding the tether and flying them "upward" again to another grating.

Compulsively, he checked the clock inside his helmet, and took another breath.

"Spock to ship," he said, through gritted teeth, as he and the captain bounced upward, now that the science officer was fully re-winding the tether, sending them—well, downward, actually, as the structure collapsed—like the Federation itself.

Rolling in the sun, the grass was the sky, then the sky rolled around above them and she was squinting in the light, and then the grass rose up again, like a green version of a Van Gogh night: all strands and curls, like invisible vibrations caressing the stars, till it was impossible to say which way was up. And, finally, Chris and Inez lay breathless on the cliff, in the waving grass. They struggled to stay together for one more moment before the inevitable separation, he rolling one way, and she the other, and laughing in spite of the seriousness of their extreme intimacy. Managing to be off-ship for a few hours always tended to bring out something playful in Starfleet personnel.

Making love to him through the eyes of another woman should have made her feel strangely jealous, or at least voyeuristic, but instead Vina felt as if Chris had somehow given her the love he had for every living thing, in his iron-clad intensity: as if love were a great, gathered light, poured down through his gaze, and focused directly inside her.

He stared into Lt. Freeman's eyes, but Vina felt it was her own heart he was seeing. At the same time, she finally understood the unfulfilled "something" he carried around in the sub-sub-sub-basement of his own sequestered emotion. She was happy for all three of them, and most certainly for herself.

"We've got to get on that Eska bomb," he said very quietly, though his eyes looked up and down Inez Freeman's face as if it were some hidden forest temple. Their noses almost touched.

"It's probably not authentically Eska," she said quietly, reluctantly admitting what the others in the science department had insisted. And in spite of their closeness, she once again felt like the junior officer, reporting her mistake to her Captain.

"No," he sighed, leaning his naked shoulders against hers for another minute. "But that's what we're meant to think."

"I think I'm on a rock," she realized, trying to wiggle to comfort again, under the weight of him.

"That's not a rock, Lieutenant," he said, squinting down at her with false nobility.

She laughed, and they rolled apart again, as slowly as they could. A great distance below, the waves rolled in one after another, as the two collected their uniforms.

"It doesn't look like the sort of place you'd turn into a minefield," he mused, slipping into his black trousers.

"But doesn't it make you think Beta-Drake ought to have some strategic importance?" she said, growing puzzled, as she stood up, like Eve.

"And you think that's a ruse, too?" he said, looking out over the glistening ocean. First, a puzzle-box explosive nearly killed his chief surgeon, and then another seems to draw attention to itself, as an obvious fake, just by its concocted mish-mash of design inspirations: triggering an explosion of pointless speculation. It all made him strangely suspicious of… he didn't know what, yet. Folk art, he supposed.

"Last report I saw," she said, getting her own slacks and blue tunic on now, "showed no particularly useful minerals down here at all."

He nodded. It all fit together, in the sense that none of it fit together at all. Just like those bombs.

"Seems like nobody can tell what's going on," she said, hesitantly.

"And that, Lieutenant, is usually the first sign of disaster," Pike nodded, looking up across the hills along the coastline. They were dressed, and an air of formality seemed to change their minds. The sea breeze whipped at Freeman's hair, and she folded her arms as if she were suddenly cold, now that they were apart, even just a few meters.

"Someone's willing to pay a high price for paradise," he said, looking up in the sky, and then down in the tall grass again, as if he'd find another mine, in spite of their first scans upon arrival. It almost seemed that only a race of vicious hoteliers, or land speculators, would lay deadly mines to keep anyone out of a world like this, till their resorts were actually built.

Vina had to wince over that, in her own personal paradise, deep inside Inez Freeman's mind. She, and Spock, and Kirk would all pay a high price for staying in this dream. Did she care? She wasn't sure. Soon they'd be on their way again, and far from Saldana. Travel time opened all sorts of possibilities.

And she had to admit, the whole new adventure, through a whole new body, had renewed her so greatly that she wanted more, and she wanted to lose every last drop of those decades of degradation through this fresh new look at her old lover: knowing at last, beyond all certainty, that she would not wake up a prisoner this time. The two realities were immediate to her, but parallel. But it was easy to see which one would make her stronger, and which would render many more dream-slaves for her enemies.

"A price too high to pay," Captain Pike muttered, speaking of the mined paradise, picking up where he'd left off: ruminating over his injured friend up in orbit; and the dangers of exploration.

And then, Vina had to wonder if it might be Spock again: speaking through Chris, just as Vulcans were inclined to think on multiple tracks at once, also ruminating over the captain's strange prophesy. In the meantime, she imagined, a fantasy like this was just one more tribute he could pay to the memory of his first starship captain. And in a purely mental state, it was almost as if Spock had been making love to her, herself. Though all that romantic prowess seemed distinctly un-Vulcan. From what she knew of Vulcans, that is.

But here they stood on the beautiful cliff, looking at his tricorder screen side by side, still watched, still observed, still playing their parts: for her own enjoyment. She could almost see Aulbram rising back up from the ground, straight up at her again, a mile over Wrigley's. She let the little boy push him off again.

Now Pike went back to the initial scan of the continent, and all the known minefields showed up in red. A computer-generated algorithm added in theoretical, yellow minefields on the map, where they should be, if a mathematical pattern actually existed at all. It was uncomfortable for Pike and Freeman to be too close, under the dangerous circumstances, but uncomfortable to be separated, too.

"That's a Lychoridan pattern," Pike said, reluctantly, at long last, naming yet another dead and vanished civilization, as he studied the mathematical layout of the minefields, the real ones, in red, and the theoretical ones, in yellow. If it was a right guess: if it was just another dead civilization whose ghosts had somehow merged with the others.

"Or, someone wantsus to _think_ it's Lychoridan," Freeman said, warming to the psychological algorithm of the day.

"Fair enough," Pike said, looking out over the rolling hills, swept by the sea breeze. He picked up a rock and threw it out onto the hill below them. It disappeared in the grass, near where the yellow field map said it should have been another mine. Then, he did it again: throwing another rock in another direction. You could barely hear it land in the grass. Nothing.

Finally, they were both walking around, picking up rocks and hurling them out into the brush, using the map as a guide, trying to hit more puzzle-boxes out there in the savannah. Still nothing.

"Now isn't that interesting," he said.

"Then it isn't Lychoridan," she sighed, straightening her sleeves on her blue science tunic.

"Or, someone wants us to _think_ it's not," he said, unable to suppress a smile in her direction. His frosty blue eyes twinkled, in spite of the threat of another interplanetary war.

Finally, he just walked right out into the waving grass.

"What are you doing?" she called out, over the crash of the waves, filled with disbelief in the land around them.

He spread his arms and shrugged, as he went. He could have been tight-rope walking. "If the rocks don't set them off, what else can I do?"

"You're _crazy_," she shouted and ran forward. Her arm grabbed his own, in a panic.

"That's not exactly out of the book, Lieutenant," he whispered, clenching her arm against his ribs.

"Sorry. You're crazy, _sir_," she said, almost exactly as before, holding his forearm with both hands. They walked uneasily across the hills.

"Why are all you men trying to kill yourselves all the time? Is it really that hard? Just being a man?"

"Well, not at the moment," he confessed, switching around behind her, and wrapping his free arm around her waist. "It's actually… not too bad at all, right now," he said, as they tried to find the first rock he'd thrown.

"Maybe," she said, after a minute, "they never finished laying their traps."

He thought for a moment, as they looked through the grass.

"If they never finished," Pike said, "then maybe they're still around."

"That doesn't make me feel any better," she said quietly.

"Maybe our algorithm just shows the places they don't think needed any protection."

"Scans don't show any unusual soil composition, distinctive minerals, or even any strategic value, on either map," he said, standing up too. There was another confounded silence.

"What if it's not about 'looking down,' she said, at last, looking up across the great daytime sky.

"Planets rotate, Lieutenant, they tilt, they move through space with their suns, and their moons," Pike sighed. "There's hardly any way to know what all this would ever look up to, specifically."

"Maybe we should stay the night," she said, matter-of-factly, though it couldn't help but sound romantic.

"You do that very well," he said, squinting and smiling.

"What?" This time, when they turned face-to-face, they were almost touching again

"Put ideas into my head."

"You don't seem like the type that lacks for inspiration," she sighed.

"Captain to _Enterprise_," he said, taking his communicator out from under the hem of his tunic, and flipping the flat top open.

"Go ahead Captain," a communications officer replied. They could hear the familiar sounds of the bridge in the background, too.

"Send down small observation groups to each of the minefields, to spend the night." After a pause, he added, "and send teams down to the yellow map zones, as well. I want to find out if there's anything different about the night, or the night sky. Oh, and see if you can give me an approximate date on the establishment of the mines, themselves."

"Aye, Captain," came Number One's voice, crisp and clear, as if the first officer had made up her mind that Inez Freeman was just a passing character in her captain's long history.

"We'll proceed to the nearest red zone ourselves," Pike finished, and put the communicator away.

They set out at a steady pace, walking into the coastal hills. And walking, and walking.

And, as they went, it occurred to Vina that she never really knew anything about Inez Freeman, from Chris Pike's past—or even anything specific about his own final "routine training mission," that nearly killed him. There were just fragments of memories, of the explosion, and rushing to the medicos, and getting through the long, partial recovery, that he'd never opened up to her.

The keepers certainly didn't have the psycho-pharmaceuticals to help him get over it, and they evidently saw no point in healing him with their own mind-probes. And she'd always just waited. And waited.

With a cold sense of dread, she began to hope there wasn't any obvious link between that horrific end to a career, and this strange untold planet-fall—that Lt. Freeman wasn't so green, or on some fast-track for promotion, that everything she did became a sort of carefully managed, one-on-one training mission, _that _particular training mission, in fact, that quite easily could have been under Chris Pike's own supervision. She had to grapple with the notion that every new step toward the red zone could be their last, and (worse than that) that she was truly lost, in the uncharted depths of his memories.

Each new hilltop revealed a vista of more hills out into the distance and, even with their tricorders, they were only guessing at their own safety. Nevertheless, Freeman kept hers open, and the trilling of the scanner merged with the gentle sigh of the grass. Just lost, together, it seemed.

Finally they reached the nearest red zone, just as night fell. They huddled together, apparently surrounded by puzzle-bombs, not knowing if each was designed to protect something below, or above, or just another point on a star-map.

"Why would anybody mine an entire continent," he sighed, "when there's no particular value in it?"

"Fear overtakes reason," Inez said.

"What's that supposed to mean?" he laughed, by her side.

"You don't stop having a survival instinct, just because you survived," she said, looking a little haunted. "You take it with you, it follows you. And the bigger your life becomes, the greater the instinct grows around it, till it wants to tear wide open. Trying to protect you, and every new thing you carry on your back. But it just screams as stretches and stretches, to over every new thing in your life."

"I thought only well-adjusted folks like me made it out this far!" he said, with his usual straight face. She didn't react, and so he held her closer.

"Ambition, jealousy, pride," she said quietly, "they're always there in the background. You can't disguise them forever."

He gently kissed her face, but she looked up as if to change the subject. There was the sky, always looking down. And she couldn't see any sign of anything different here, any high-rent view, to make the land worth blowing-up to save. Why didn't the keepers feel the same?

"I know we're just trying to make a difference in each other's lives," she said, at last, almost as if it was Vina's voice, herself, speaking up impatiently from a hundred miles below the surface of her skin. "But is this just… normal for you?"

"Well," Pike said, looking up as well now, even as she turned to study his chiseled chin, "up there, I have to be nice to nearly 400 people all the time. Encourage nearly 400 people, all the time. Be ready to reprimand, write up, or even write-off any one of them, any time, for reasons I've barely read about in the rule book myself. Just now, though," he said, looking almost sad, "I'd like to relax and give the rest of myself to just one person, if you don't mind."

She relaxed visibly, and finally welcomed his embrace.

"So," he said, finding her tender hand down in the grass, in the dark, "no. To answer your question: this is not normal for me. Not… routine."

Both women sighed with relief, for different reasons: Freeman, for having finally said what was on her mind, and because he hadn't reacted badly; and Vina, because she was now fairly sure they weren't about to be blown to bits, at any moment.

Once again though, she felt like a withered old woman buried deep inside a young one's body. Even worse, this time, just speaking new words into Spock's memory stream was like struggling to wake up from a dream: she tried and tried, but her own will seemed to smother under the weight of the beautiful illusion. She struggled to make her feelings known.

"_I've loved you across every moment of your life,"_ she wanted to say, impossible as it would seem to him now, as they sat beneath the stars. But Chris was blissfully unaware: young and handsome and healthy and caught up in a riddle they'd never yet shared.

Then they were lying down, looking up and imagining whole new sets of constellations from this tiny speck in space, as if it had some special view of the galaxy, or beyond. And it was as if they were, at last, another Adam and Eve, naming the animals of the heavens, albeit with a much larger frame of reference. And not just pretending, for the sake of the keepers.

"And that one," Chris said, his finger pointing up into another shimmering sector of space, "is like a…. Bedouin in his robes, riding on a… Tholian jelly-crab."

"We'll call them the 'strange bedfellows' nebula," Inez laughed.

"I think we're all 'strange bedfellows' out here," Chris sighed.

"There is no 'happily ever after' constellation?" she said, after a brief silence.

"Not for 'ever after,' Lieutenant—they never really stay the same, of course," Pike said, rising up on his elbows, and smiling down on her as if he were an unusually handsome asteroid, threatening to crash-land on her own face. "Of course, in a hundred billion years, there might be—and by then, the jelly-crab will be riding the Bedouin!"

She laughed a little, in spite of a sudden wave of melancholy. Out of nowhere, things were beginning to seem impossible again, so far from the permanence of the Federation. He lowered himself down to her side.

"What if it's not the sky, and not the land?" she said, with a sort of defeated sigh.

"You mean, the atmosphere? The magnetic fields? Migrating ducks?" He squinted down toward her face in the dark again, revealing his slightly wolfish grin.

She stared and stared up into the sky, thinking of angels flying up into heaven. Or, the dead transforming back into the earth, underground, after many years.

"The memory of the earth," she whispered.

"The what?"

"When the people on Altair VI die, they're buried in the ground, and their souls are supposed to migrate into the soil, to live on," she said, fascinated and skeptical all at once, "till the planet becomes… well, we would say 'self-aware.' It's their idea of… paradise, that impending moment of 'natural singularity.'"

"Why do we have to be aware of every possible level of this planet's atmosphere, or geology?" he complained tiredly, "or be aware of every level of disguise on some damn land mine?"

"It all means something, or it wouldn't be there. In _most_ cases," she added.

"It can mean everything to you," Chris Pike sighed, "but not to me. I have to look at the utility: is it a weapon; is it a tool; or just one of a million other things that weapons or tools allow?"

"Yes sir," she said quietly. But it wasn't long before they both felt the earth sigh around them. Somehow, they seemed to be descending into it, beneath the pinpoints of light in the heavens.

"Do you feel something?" she said, rolling onto her stomach and dragging her tricorder closer by its long black strap.

"Now you're getting jumpy," he scoffed, quietly. But the way he straightened his gold velour tunic seemed to disguise a sudden itchy sensation. He turned to look over her shoulder, at the scanner. "Ants at the picnic," he added, hovering over her back, pretending to brush tiny insects from her uniform, that weren't really there.

"This works out better for me, anyway," she said, sitting up and forcing the captain to lean back all of a sudden.

"What does?"

"Just knowing it's not some big deal to you. I'm glad to know."

"I didn't say it wasn't a big deal," Chris Pike said, surprised at her sudden change of mood, and her pretense of abstraction. She seemed to have chosen to become completely absorbed by the tricorder readings now.

"That's okay," she sighed, her own face, unexpectedly, like a mask of Vulcan stillness.

"Oh, come on," he said, gently putting his arms around her waist. The light was a faint, and cold, and blue from the stars.

"No, really, it's better. Better to know I'm not at stake. All my life, anyone I gave my love to, it just wasn't good enough, somehow."

"What?"

"It's all right," she said, very quietly.

"Who said your love wasn't good enough?"

"Basically, everyone I ever fell in love with, one way or another. Of course, they were all authority figures, to me, anyway. And, in a way, for each of them, I guess you'd say their first love was really just themselves." She shrugged, but it seemed more like a violent spasm, in a dream. He began rubbing her shoulders.

"Well, I'm sure they just didn't know enough about you, or how to be grateful," he said, a little stunned by her revelation. Once again, life really was very different, for a starship captain.

"My first boyfriend, my first _real _boyfriend, I mean," Inez Freeman said, twisting around, looking out over Pike's shoulder, as if that old lover might still be there watching, "We met when I was kind of forced to settle down in Starfleet, to get serious about it. But I think he just wanted a female version of himself. There was no blending—he would not blend." Then, she seemed childishly annoyed. "People are so absorbed by themselves, right?"

"I know," Pike said, also looking off past her silhouette in the dark.

"And the more he got to know me," she laughed coolly, "I guess the less he got to know himself. And that just took all the romance right out of it, for him! You know? And it's always been that way, for me. I was never enough. Not for the type of boys I was interested in, anyway."

"Well, everybody probably has at least one like that," Pike supposed.

"Not starship captains," she said, taunting him with a smile.

"It's not our fault," he smiled. "We're constantly dodging ourselves, and our feelings. And so we're probably doomed to miss out the one thing out there that's good and real!"

"Maybe," she said, finally looking him in the eye, or where she thought his eye was, in the darkness.

"And," he sighed, looking up again, "out here, you're as much an alien as anybody else, with no place to call home. No matter how much you try, it's useless to strive for any kind of permanence."

"Then why are you always trying to plant your flag in me?" she said, with comical grievance. Once again they were kissing and laughing and lying in the grass together.

"Then, are you just trying to hit the 'reset' button on your first boyfriend, with me?" Pike said very quietly in her ear, as they pressed closer and closer. The puzzles of each of their hearts began to hypnotize them both.

"I don't know," she teased, very quietly. "If I didn't work on the _Enterprise_, would you even be interested in me?"

"I think there might be just a few other women in my life who _haven't _worked on the USS _Enterprise_, Lieutenant."

"Well, okay. As long as it's just a few."

The Vulcan had been clever, but the game went on.

Through a series of patient maneuvers, the long-forgotten Krishtakonka had developed a seemingly harmless protocol within the aquarium life-support system. If she could just get enough of a crevasse opened in the Vulcan's security precautions, her new programming should begin operate as an outer shell around ship's own programming, though her new system existed only within a small bubble of computer space, for the moment: cobbled together from the subtlest of repeated commands, toned and rephrased in ways that would challenge deeper and deeper levels of the ship's own thinking. The plan had collapsed twice already, like a shelter of shells on a roaring ocean vent. And, each time it was swept away, she rebuilt her little mechanism with simple binary commands, till it seemed just a little bit stronger.

Yes, in the process of manipulating the ship's computer, she had to endure temperatures and chemicals that weakened her and made this tiny living space a cauldron of corrosive compounds. _Temporarily_, she kept reminding herself, as her tentacles writhed in the dark, and she worked the binary control panel, and her understanding of the vessel grew. Her sleeves had blossomed in response to some of the new conditions, making her look like a flowering trellis, but it was only for a few hours, in which she bore the wild cascades of mating glory, down every arm, unseen.

If she could only enlist the help of the dry-land female, things would certainly progress much faster. This tiny taste of freedom was maddening. And, of course, she had no real guarantee of her new hosts' proclaimed intentions, to calm her wounded spirit.

It was a little like being probed, and gradually forgotten, on Talos IV. Spock had shared minds with her and, up till a few minutes ago, Vina had united with Krishtakonka too, as they hovered over Saldana II. But now everyone had realized that her frame of reference was so wildly off-kilter compared to any humanoid's, that she might as well have been hidden away in some forgotten set of dimensions, constructed, compromised on, and left barely standing by some clever physicist, for the not-quite-real among us.

Likewise, it seemed the keepers had lost interest in her as a peaceful explorer whose race had tirelessly educated her and sent her out to ponder the greater depths. Of course, by the time they'd grown more familiar with her storehouse of memories and peaceful adventures, the Talosians coolly realized Krishtakonka was perhaps a bit beneath their interest. She'd been in grim hibernation since then: ossified, as if hardened into coral till things finally broke apart.

She could feel the keepers lashing out at the ship, from across many systems. It was as if she and Vina and the Tellarite and the Starfleet commanders were all crossing some lake of fire, as temptations and rebukes licked up at them, trying to drag them down with some new disaster. And yet, she also recognized the others were more or less unaware they were under attack—only that their souls were tormented by something unseen.

So the obvious question arose: was she plotting to divert the ship for her own reasons, or being "turned" somehow to serve the keepers' wicked purpose? Commandeering the ship and taking it back to her own home world, blessed though that may be, would certainly not help James T. Kirk in his mission. The keepers might prefer it, wanting to avoid any more confrontations, until it was too late to resist—when they managed whole planetary systems, whole armadas, months or weeks or days from now. And right along-side, half the people who could help her were withdrawing into themselves through the self-madness, or self-prison, of hopeless love.

Then she weighed her own similar feelings, measured against the progress she'd made to take control of the ship. As much as she wanted to get home right away, it was all too jumbled up, and too potentially corrupted, even in her own mind. One way or another, they'd each been filled with plotting and anguish—with the possible exception of the captain himself, who had seemed to function in a state of cold calculation, beneath a kaleidoscope of apparent madness, all along—exactly the opposite of the Vulcan. Or, so it seemed to her. And she couldn't even be sure of her own feelings any longer.

Jim Kirk stood and watched as Spock and Vina sat together like two little children in playground detention, heads down and bodies curled up against a bulkhead, as they all sped to their next destination. He knew that Spock was working hard to placate her, nurturing her, and her relative mastery of the keepers' ways. But he could only hope his first officer would be able to break free of her undying love, of _their _undying love, when he needed Spock again.

Mrs. Stamfield had fled the collapsing space tower when Kirk disappeared in the smoke, and was later placed officially in charge, by Kirk's emergency order. And, as far as anyone could tell, the keepers who were trapped inside when the elevator went tumbling down across the fields and farmland, were either phasered into oblivion, or came crashing down with it, all joints and screeching metal, pounding down in the dark distance, section by section, like Midwest thunder.

In that one case, or maybe even in all the coming struggles, it seemed the only way to save the Federation was to chop the blue flag into hundreds of little pieces, and quarantine each planet against all the others, until any contagion could be wiped out. This could force thousands or even millions of scientists on faraway outposts into desperation, waiting for supplies, if it dragged on for more than months. He just prayed it wouldn't be years. He finally turned away from the little cabin, and the two figures curled up in the corner.

"This way," General Hof grunted, "at least she will know which side she's on!" He had been standing behind Kirk in the gangway, peering into the little cubicle. It did seem a little like the two were praying together, Spock and Vina, though on first glance neither seemed to have a single soul between them: he with his pointed ears; and she in those tattered black strings and triangles, barely concealed under that barbaric-looking fur coat. Both dreaming of Chris Pike. And in a fleeting moment of self-pity, Jim Kirk wondered if anyone would ever mourn for him, like that.

Hof backed clumsily into another tiny cabin to let Kirk past, up to the cockpit: where stars raced by in the glass above the controls. He tried to slip into his command chair again, and not to think about how he'd been thinking the exact same thing as the Tellarite, watching Vina and Spock together, hoping it would somehow cement their relationship, for all their common good.

"Are you just going to just let them sit like that? Like a couple of wire-heads?" Hof had followed him up to the bow of the ship, though Kirk seemed not to hear the admonition. It was hard to imagine a Tellarite that didn't sound perpetually aggrieved, at any rate. His scampering gait didn't help much, either—it made the general seem like he was chasing after Kirk, in the midst of some heated argument.

"And how will you defeat them the next time, with those two incapacitated?"

Kirk seemed to ignore the question, not entirely sure if the Tellarite was arguing, or merely reasoning in a mildly offensive tone of voice. And now he supposed he knew how Spock felt, all along, when Dr. McCoy found a highly charged emotional element buried in some unemotional discussion or other.

He had a rough idea of where his chief medical officer, and the _Enterprise_, must be about now: off to a new, unexplored sector, on schedule, landing parties down to one new world after another. Unless, of course, something had come up. Unless, like the _Ticonderoga_, they'd been ordered away.

**Chapter Eleven **

**SHIP'S LOG, STARDATE 4201.91 **Chief Engineer Scott reporting_. It is with great sadness that we have learned of the death of Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock, on an undisclosed mission which took them from us eight standard days ago. Words cannot describe the heartache and sadness that now consume the crew and myself, whom they so ably led. We now proceed into fleet maneuvers, as ordered._

"There has to be more to it than that!" Dr. McCoy insisted, slapping his hand down, almost in slow-motion, on the captain's chair. Scotty didn't seem to notice. Both men felt the pressure of the sudden tragedy, not just in a way they could hide, as men, but also from the tearful faces they saw on every deck, in the first hours after the news.

"Aye, Doctor," the engineer sighed, "but what'd ye have me do? Go flyin' all the way back to Starfleet and shake 'em till they tell us what happened?"

"Well they sure as hell don't need us here!" It was the truest possible sentiment, as usual, and the viewscreen on the bridge revealed exactly what the doctor meant, as great ships spread out across two thousand kilometers fore and aft. McCoy folded his hands gruffly behind his back, as if waiting for the Universe to concede the rightness of his position.

It was certainly the greatest human armada ever assembled, with the _Enterprise_, and three other starships spread out, the _Biruni_, the _Defiant _and _Ticonderoga_: and a whole super-cluster of lesser blinking navigation lights spread-out ahead of them, battleships, dreadnaughts, quick-attack vessels, and everything else that might be needed in reserve in the coming weeks, after Wrigley, and after Saldana, of which they only partly knew.

Scotty heaved a deep sigh, and was glad for the ritualistic stability of the long formation of vessels, as he sat on his sadness in private. But, under the circumstances, the _Enterprise _would have to stand out in her mourning.

"Lieutenant Uhura," he said, as soothingly as he could manage.

"Aye, sir," the communications officer said, sounding as her throat were tying itself in knots.

"Shift sailing colors to protocol Eight."

"Protocol Eight, aye, sir," Uhura said, almost too quietly to be heard.

And, when she touched a series of lighted buttons on her console, over his right shoulder on the bridge, the outer skin of the ship turned black as space itself, dotted with running lights and observation portals, like stars. The effect was strangely dark and ferocious, and the registry numbers and name turned to a cold, bright, contrasting silver, almost like a photographic negative of the ship's usual appearance. It was all achieved with a simple energy charge, flipping molecular arrangements in the thin, outermost layer of the ship's hull, just as Admiral McCrae's black intelligence uniform suddenly turned white back at Starbase. And in this new moment's shifting, the _Enterprise_ was sailing in a state of grief for all to see, her skin a modern version of coded flags that flapped in the breeze above the sailing ships of old.

Uhura looked startled, then puzzled, and finally calm and almost hypnotized—as if her console had shown a cascade of new messages arriving: inquiries or orders; and then, just as suddenly, the blinking lights returning to their everyday readings, which she'd seen a million times. But a renewed sense of despair weighted down her fingers from doing yet another diagnostic check on the relays, and kept her mind from analyzing that impossibly brief instant of blurred realities. She put it down to the sudden stress and emotional upheaval.

It seemed they just sailed along with the flotilla, answering all the usual, anticipated, run-of-the-mill messages, as if everyone must already know of their grief, but had respectfully chosen to let them get through it in silence, as a private matter for now. To the crew of the blackened _Enterprise_, it was as if the entire fleet was equally stunned into the same stillness, and the same misery and disbelief: sitting on their sadness, though it grew up like a strangling vine around them, twisting each man and woman into new shapes and poses, to suit the purpose of some unknown vine-dresser.

If any other ship had visually signaled the _Enterprise_, with the 23rd Century equivalent of an Aldis lamp, none on board ever knew it. Several nearby ships may have tried, out of concern and alarm at the sudden shift to dark coloration, and her equally sudden descent into silence. And, to those on board the _Enterprise_, everything seemed as resolute as mourners at graveside.

It would be an hour till the commanders of the other ships gave up and boarding parties were assigned to find out what had made the _Enterprise _as black and silent as space itself. But a lot could happen in an hour. No one would even know, except the crews of boarding parties themselves, surprised and exploding in the vacuum of space, that the _Enterprise_ was long gone already, many hundreds of light years away. And, by then, there was nothing to be done about it.

It would be longer, still, before anyone on board the _Enterprise_ realized that their merest, fleeting thought had become the absolute reality of the situation—and that the fixed intent of their military minds was only an illusion. If a navigator like Mr. Sulu had the slightest momentary whim (purely from grief) to break out of the vast formation and warp off in some totally unexpected direction, then that was what actually happened, and likewise all throughout the ship. In the formation they'd left behind, a blanket sense of routine soon blinded the rest of the fleet to the truth about the _Enterprise, _and her new mission to destroy the secret scout ship, with Captain Kirk and all aboard. In this way, the keepers' invasion had begun, and was nearly complete.

"So, General," Kirk said, during the long stretch of space-flight, "tell me about your greatest victory."

Hof seemed to grunt, behind the pilot's seat, and with greater difficulty than before (owing to his expanding waist-line) he wedged himself between the two padded chairs, and into the co-pilot's side. But Jim Kirk thought he heard something unpleasant in Hof's initial reaction, that momentary grunt, as the Tellarite was initially frozen in a confrontation with his own past.

"There is no such thing as victory, Earth man," Hof grumbled, sarcastically, running a finger-pad from his fore-paw across the smooth black control panel: as if checking for dust during some official inspection. "You should know that. No such thing as greatest victory, either, except to carry on. Except to die with honor."

The shocking bluntness of that assessment caught Kirk off-guard, and he was forced to nod slightly. How long would he go on underestimating the Tellarite, he wondered.

"But your victory parades?" Kirk said, in spite of himself, flummoxed still by the intense bitterness of Hof's grunting sense of command, which made him very believable now, as a leader—compared with his seemingly mad love of glory, down in the cells of Talos.

"A foolish indulgence," Hof said, folding his arms and closing his eyes, as if he would simply go to sleep forever, if he'd had any choice in the matter, right now. "A way, merely, to pass the time. But go ahead and tell me of your own great victories, if that's what you were planning." He could barely restrain a small chuckle, and leaned back as if to nap.

But Kirk was instantly embarrassed, in a way he hadn't been for a long time. He suddenly felt cut down to size, and that he'd have been nothing at all (at least temporarily) without his incomprehensibly brilliant first officer, his magnificent navigator, his resolute friend and physician, and the greatest ship in the fleet. His felt now that his own great good fortune had made him proud and foolish, beyond any ridiculous pride that Hof might ever know.

"Well," Kirk said, finally able to laugh at himself, "I've been stabbed, and strangled, and poisoned, and a hundred other things."

"And survived to tell the tale!" Hof opened his eyes now, but otherwise sat still. "Excellent."

"It's all just luck," the starship captain sighed.

"You are modest, for an Earth man!"

"Perhaps," Kirk said. The silences between them were growing a bit longer, after each spoke, and more strangely, sadly sentimental.

"'My great victories,'" Hof sighed and chuckled sadly, and then grew bitter. "How I wish I could forget them all. Each and every one of them."

"Then you _are_ a great commander," Kirk nodded for, in the dread of battle, there was almost no such thing as victory, only failures of greater or lesser value to a cause. The sudden, surprise attack was for cowards, or only to be used in the face of certain death.

"Victory... Glory," Hof snorted quietly. "Glory is the bit between our teeth: the way the weak and the powerless lead us around, to make their lives easier. And duty is the only master worth serving, till a worthy cause must finally come along."

A chilly silence filled the cockpit, almost damping out the sound of the computers and sensor noise in Kirk's ears. He felt a rueful kind of embarrassment, and had the sudden strange impulse to restore General Hof to the kind of leader he might actually have been, before his own terrible twist of fate. A false general would never understand the ambivalence of command, the starship captain told himself and, therefore, Hof must be what he claims to be. Kirk twisted and rose out of his big padded chair.

"You wouldn't be opposed to some strong drink, General, would you?" he asked, lingering for a moment over the Tellarite's shoulder.

"I am opposed to only three things in life, Earth man: wine, women… and _song!_" he said, as if song were the worst of them all. "So we must deal with them each, one at a time!"

And with that, Kirk disappeared down the gangway for barely two minutes. He returned with a large flask of blue liquor and two glasses, all from the modest food synthesizer. And, an hour later, they were singing the filthiest drinking songs either one could remember.

Inez Freeman's gaze swept out across the endless brilliant stars, to the warm shadow of Chris Pike's shoulder, rising like a cliff on her left. And it seemed to her again, for the second time that evening, that she was sinking into the soft grass, down into the earth like some resting soul into Altair VI, to merge with the eternal, embryonic soul of that world. Until she realized something else was actually rising up, all around them: glowing objects like the stars themselves.

"Captain!" She couldn't keep from sitting up in alarm.

He had his communicator out and flipped open now, and she was slowly turning in a circle with her tricorder in front of her. Both of them were up suddenly, two figures against the stars: Pike with one hand (almost comically) on his phaser. He contacted the ship and described what seemed to be those land mines, floating with a dreamy glow, which first seemed like stars: as if the sky had come down to embrace them in the night.

"Yes, Captain," Number One's voice came back to him, "we're getting similar reports from all across the continent."

"Analysis," Pike said. The glowing lights cast off a faint yellow haze, like the ancient gaslights in some public park in 19th Century London. All they needed now was a horse-drawn carriage to come rolling by…

"Science says the device we kept in transporter-stasis may have multiple functions," the brilliant brunette said, up in the ship.

"Explain."

"Beyond the explosive capability, Captain, there may be multiple other mechanisms integrated into its design."

"Transmit to all landing parties via tricorders," Pike nodded. The glowing fountains seemed to be moving now, circling… around them. "Red alert," he added, though Inez Freeman had already drawn her own phaser, and they were circling back to back in the dark.

"Objects that seem to be a puzzle-box—of dead cultures," Pike reasoned aloud. "But, with a technology beyond any of them."

"Or an amalgamation of cultures we now consider dead," Freeman said, right behind him, facing the other way, "somehow forged into something new and different and…" she was just stumbling through the words, toward the truth.

"Deadly," Pike nodded. The gaslights were definitely dancing around them, like a carousel of distant galaxies, but not moving away.

"Let's not waste any more time, Lieutenant," Pike said. "Fire and destroy."

But the objects were zinging toward them now, in streaks of white, even as the red blast of their weapons flared outward, creating a series of exotic fireworks in the night. They dodged this way and that, rolling and firing, diving and firing, trying not to hit each other with the screaming red beams of light from their hands.

In a moment, the devices were about half-destroyed, though several were still darting past them, again and again. Pike noticed that Freeman had stopped firing her phaser, and when he turned around he saw her lying face down in the grass.

He kept firing, even as he managed to kneel down next to her, and finally flip her over. One of the devices had landed on her right eye, and was fading from glowing white to black. Without hesitation or remorse, he began ripping it off her face, even at the risk of another explosion, for the object had violated her beauty.

It was very hectic, but he was also firing almost randomly as the other devices whizzed by his own head, and he ducked this way and that, to keep them away, even if he couldn't destroy them. He got the heel of his boot up by the side of her head and, just as the object finally tore loose from her orbital socket, he clamped his foot down on it on the ground. It blew up, under his thick sole, throwing him over and away from Inez—but he scrambled and kept firing and dodging, as the buzzing numbness in his heel gradually stopped.

"Beam us up," he said, loud and clear into his communicator, and the lights of that night were washed away by the transporter glow, till they were lying on the pads on board the _Enterprise_. "Beam us all up, as fast as you can."

When he got up, he half-dragged his officer off the beaming platform, and saw the faces of other crewmen already brought up, standing around the transporter console looking ashen and stunned. Another pair of medics rushed in from the curving corridor to take Inez Freeman out of his arms, and off to sickbay.

Another landing party was already beaming up behind him, and the process was repeated—one or two more crewmen, barely conscious or aware, were hurried out of the transporter room, and their away-mates stood there looking shocked and trying to make sense of what had just happened in the magical, dreamy night.

"Back to your posts, or to sickbay, for the injured," Pike said loudly and with that inevitable snarl that had no patience for hand-wringing. He was out in the corridor and marching angrily to sickbay himself now, even as another pair of medics rushed the other way, and then another pair after that, and then a security guard and another medic, as they were apparently getting short-handed now.

Of course he wanted to demand answers from the doctors and nurses in blast-gear, hovering over the beds, and kneeling over the late arrivals on the floor. Pike couldn't tell who was who, in the medical department, as they were all covered in visors and gloves and chest plates, like gladiators or ship welders. He began to lean in toward one of the injured crewman, and one of the big, robotic-looking medics thrust a helmet down on his head, as another jammed a chest pad, weighing all of seventy-five kilos, over his shoulders. Then came the big arm's length metallic gloves, and he seemed isolated from the panic, or isolated within his own panic, and cut-off from his own ability to push things along.

A loud "bang!" behind him signaled the death of one of his crewmen and, when he turned, he could see the doctors and nurses in their huge gear hoisting the remains off the bed, even as another pair of medics rushed in with another limp body from the planet. The bedding was flipped over to the clean side, and another patient was laid right down in the dead man's place, for his own emergency surgery. Trails of blood dribbled down the big scanning screen over the new man's head, and red boot-prints soon checkered the deck.

"We've got to stabilize them," one of the doctors was saying, as Pike listened through the speakers inside his blast helmet. And the sound of his own breathing rushed like the blood racing through his own body.

"On the planet," he said, to no one in particular, "I was able to force one of those things off Lt. Freeman, but I had to get it under the heel of my boot right away."

"We've had another report like that, but the blast still did some damage to both of them," another voice in his ears said grimly, as the doctors tried to wedge an identical black disk off a crewman's eye. As he worked—or, perhaps, as _she _worked—the other blast-padded medicos huddled around, to create as much of a human wall around the deadly device as they could, and protect the others on their tables.

"I guess we were the diamonds, or the dilithium, ourselves," Pike sighed, watching as they seemed to press him farther and farther away from the surgery.

"What's that?" another voice said in his ears.

"I said, 'I guess somebody knew that planet would be irresistible to some space-faring race, sooner or later. And we became the fish in their nets."

"Where are you," the same voice asked, faintly. It was Inez. He raised his hand, covered in impenetrable metals and great round gleaming ball joints at his elbow and wrist.

"I can't see you," she sighed. He looked around and began stepping over bodies and nurses all around on the floor, until he found a dark-skinned woman's hand on one of the beds, with an isolation helmet on her head.

"Is that what they're wearing on Rigel, these days, Lieutenant?"

"Hm," she said, too tired to respond.

"It was a lovely time," he said, a little wearily himself, "up till then." He lifted off the heavy helmet at last.

"Have to kiss my other side," she said, very faintly, from inside the medical box. The words actually came out of the helmet, in his lap.

"Miss Freeman, I will kiss you anywhere, and any time, I please," he said quietly, but firmly. He squeezed her hand, but it looked like she'd finally fallen asleep. And though the whole of sickbay must have heard it, no one seemed to notice, in the struggle all around.

"There's no way to be certain of exactly when these mines, or devices, were laid," the young Vulcan science officer said, in the briefing room an hour later. Everyone had seen or heard of the chaos in sickbay by now, and the mood was quiet and respectful. Even Mr. Spock, who usually seemed strangely excited by any new or unexplained phenomenon, managed to "feel" pensive enough to blend in with his human crewmates.

"They seemed entirely inert in the planet's biosphere, until we activated them, somehow," Pike nodded.

"Precisely," Spock said, tapping a few buttons on a computerized wedge-pad, and calling up another image on the tri-screen in the middle of the long table.

"Well, then," Lt. Kelso said, folding his arms, "let's get out of here before somebody gets the message that we're ripe for the harvest."

"They could be long-dead themselves, like the civilizations they seem to have cobbled together, for whatever reason," Spock argued, with the half-smile of a Vulcan who loves to ponder over the imponderable. "Or, they could be five galaxies away by now."

"The natural erosion and changes in the planet should have buried some of the objects deep underground, over that length of time," Number One said, very mildly correcting the eager young science officer. "They couldn't be as old as you're suggesting."

"Maybe," Pike said. It was also possible that the mobility that gave them flight and the power they had to burrow into human bone may have also kept them up on the surface indefinitely, where they'd be ready to do… their work. But he wasn't in the mood to bat it around forever.

"No sign of alien ships approaching?" he turned to the helmsman, at his left.

"No sir, no ships at all, besides us, out here." It was pretty much the standard answer for the _Enterprise_. Not all that much different from mankind's first few million years on Earth, isolated and alone, except for the occasional little discovery. Except that everything was spread so far apart; and the "Earth" in this case had less than 400 people on board.

"Inform Starfleet," Pike said, putting his hands on the edge of the briefing room table, as if he were about to get up and pace the decks till he knew what to do. But he just stayed there, staring across the table, at the wall.

"Aye, Captain," Number One replied.

"How's Doctor Boyce," someone asked, after a brief moment had passed.

"He's actually the only one in sickbay I'm not worried about, all of a sudden," Dr. Braden said, looking a bit surprised at the turn of events, which had shoved aside the sentimentality of an old doctor's recovery, as much as it still seemed to suggest his imminent retirement. She shook her head at their dramatic shift in priorities.

One by one, the others at the long table dared to glance at the captain, in his moment of hard thoughtfulness. It was fairly clear he was realizing, for the ten thousandth time, the occasional powerlessness of powerful men, and perhaps wondering if the powerless ever felt so utterly guilty, when things went wrong.

He thought about the crewman's head exploding, two beds behind him earlier that night, and the blood trickling down the scanning screen, and how they'd hurried the body away and out to cold storage to make room for the next one, and the one after that. But what could he do, if there was no actual enemy to engage? If all that was left were the relics of vanished peoples, and explosives that irrationally grabbed on to their sleeping victims?

There was nothing else to do but cordon off the planet, lovely as it may be, to forbid man from another paradise: unfit for happiness, or so it seemed. And then have some forensic team look at all the evidence, and hope they could make something out of it. Then wonder if the creatures that set those traps, and perhaps gobbled up all those lost civilizations, really were five galaxies away—or if it really would take a good long time before they ever found out their traps had been sprung.

It would be a hundred years, or more, before mankind's next encounter with the Borg Collective.


	7. Chapters 12 and 13

**Chapter Twelve **

"And what was the point of that, Vulcan?" Vina seemed perplexed and a little angry, as the two awoke from a romantic memory which ended as enigmatically as it began. Perhaps she was simply anguished at its sudden ending, or the hardness the Vulcan had known in life on board a starship.

"The Universe is full of many wonders, only a tiny handful of which are happy," Spock replied, and stood up. Strange, giddy men's singing came from up in the cockpit, and he gently helped her to her feet as well. "Others can be made… peaceful, at least, with understanding."

"It doesn't make things right," Vina grumbled, sounding old, though she looked so young and beautiful. She seemed to be daring him to cheer her up. But, privately, it occurred to him that she would do better to expend her energy in finding the beauty in things around her.

"One cannot ransom sorrow, madam," he replied gently, regaining his Shakespearean rhythms, though his words were tinged with compassion. "For no one wants it back, once it's been passed along. Find something else worth trading." He stood in the doorway of the cabin, before stepping out to check on the aquatic being across the gangway.

"Tell me, Mr. Spock," Vina said, from the doorway behind him, "did you bring Chris back to Talos for him, or for yourself? So he could re-live his years with you, as a brothers-in-arms?"

"His greatest power," the Vulcan said, as he examined the life-support panel outside the water tank, "was to love: his mission, his ship, his crew. It took a heavy toll. Only on Talos could he live out that love… when all else betrayed him. So it is with most men, if they live long enough." He spoke quietly, without deigning to turn around to face her, as he busied himself with the blinking lights by the aquarium wall. The drunken singing had resumed up on the fore-deck.

There was something that perplexed him about the aquatic life support system, and the slightly different pace of their blinking lights, now and then—though purely on an intuitive level: something seemed wrong, in those very rare double-steps of sequencing, though it might have just been his purely logical distrust of a brilliant being, confined so long. And in that moment he realized that Vina was quite the same, in some respects, as Krishtakonka: so perhaps he could not blame her for everything she'd had to leave behind, and everything life had taken away before that.

"Would you like to commune with this being?" He stepped back, adopting a pose of the greatest respect, head bowed slightly.

"I should like to be with my own kind now, if you please," Vina said, weary of being tested, and slipped past him, toward the sound of singing. Mr. Spock, being well aware of the effect of alcohol and women on his captain, followed quietly, a few paces behind. The strange impression he got from the patterns of blinking lights was left for later analysis.

"Ah!" shouted General Hof, raising his arm grandly, "the hairless female approaches!" He'd apparently forgotten all about the madness he claimed to have seen in her.

"Sleeping Beauty," Captain Kirk smiled graciously, rising from the pilot's seat and offering it to her. She settled in cozily, feeling the warmth he'd left behind and, in a moment, she too had a glass of blue liquor. Only her head and golden hair, and her arm with the slender glass in her fingers, came out of the top of the fur coat, which she used as a shimmering blanket. Her naked toes peeked out from the hem of the cape, back and forth, below.

"And the Vulcan!" Hof laughed, alerting Jim Kirk. "Come to steal our souls with his great rationality!" The Tellarite held out his big paws toward his neck, as if each furry hand was a monster coming in to choke him to death.

Out through the portals, the stars raced by in warp-space. None of them knew where they were going next: they could be far out in the periphery, though it seemed their enemies had chosen to go right in to the heart of the galaxy for their next captives.

"Oh," Vina sighed, as they sat and stood in the cockpit. Her free hand came out from under the furs, to stroke her forehead.

"Are you all right?" Kirk was kneeling at her side, and Spock had a little medi-scanner in his fingertips, hovering across Kirk, to Vina's chest and head. The sound of the scanner became thin and raspy as the rotating dish inside the clear-end spun around, a few inches from the side of her face.

Spock withdrew the little device, and the two men whispered quietly at the rear of the control room.

"These readings indicate her body has now fully metabolized the Talosian blood in her system for the last few weeks," the science officer said, barely moving his lips.

"Meaning…" Kirk ducked his head, "she won't have her telepathic powers anymore."

"Indeed," Spock said, as if weighing a serious illness, far from adequate medical care.

"And without that," the captain reasoned, "she won't be able to combat them on their level."

"There is another point to consider," Spock said.

The Tellarite let out a scream, or mournful howl, in pain or horror.

When they bolted up to the pilot's seat, they saw what was happening. Vina was losing her power of illusion, and her youth and beauty, once more. Her hair was turning from silky gold to thin white, and her glowing tanned skin was going transparent with blue veins and age spots fading into view. Microscopic wrinkles became bigger and bigger as they watched.

Kirk took her hand, which had become light and frail. She closed her eyes, and was breathing rapidly as if she might faint. The big fur coat seemed to be lying on the chair, with no body underneath at all, just the weak little head, bobbing forward slightly.

Now her head lolled to one side, as the hump on one shoulder seemed to grow out from under the fur. And, in just a half a minute, she looked as though she would never get up again, on her own.

"I'll get you… _more_ Talosian blood. Somehow, I don't know how. But you have to hold on! Vina—you have to stay with us!" Kirk was still kneeling at her side, trying to rest a comforting hand on the fur coat, and whatever brittle bones lay beneath.

"You can't leave her here!" Hof complained, aghast.

"She had the power to interfere with their illusions," Kirk said, gritting his teeth and wondering if they were suddenly, irrevocably, over-matched.

"She should be able to get it back, if the Talosian blood has the same effect as before," his first officer mumbled, almost into his human ear.

"She looks so… _old_ now—much older than when we left Chris Pike back there, two years ago," Kirk said, tilting his head as if indicating the world of the keepers they'd left behind. That everyone left behind.

"She has been driving herself like a much younger woman," Spock said, "against a highly dangerous adversary, under conditions of extreme hardship and deprivation."

"An old woman in a young woman's body," Kirk said ruefully, folding his great arms across his chest, looking for Vina's reflection in the cockpit windows. She'd shrunk to almost nothing, without her power of illusion. And it the loss of it had somehow stolen all their hope, as well.

There was a long period of silence, as the three males pondered their next move. Finally, Jim Kirk gently scooped her up and carried her, still covered in that luxurious coat, back to one of the cabins, getting her in to the hammock, and making sure she was warm within her pelts. Then, he just stood: staring at her, and at what he thought she had been, and what she must have been hiding, all this time. Like his mother, like Mrs. Vedder on Saldana, she seemed to have disappeared within her body, as if she'd fallen through a hole in her own heart.

"Captain!" It was Spock's voice, from up front.

The ship lurched, and when he looked back, her small form in the hammock was still. But it swayed back and forth as he gripped the door frame. In a moment he was pushing himself off the gangway walls as he tried to plunge forward to the cockpit again.

Stars guttered bright and then dim like the flames of melted candles as they streaked away, and the ship careened to a new heading. The streaks of light, broken up as the warp engines went suddenly out of balance, were like a hundred strange card tricks many light years away, as control of their vessel was taken from them.

"What is it?"

"Unknown," the Vulcan said, although the possibilities were fairly limited: some new Talosian interference, some new computer alteration in the randomization of their targets, or…

"I would like to take the life-support for our aquatic passenger off-line," Spock said, through tightened lips, after crouching above the controls for a good five seconds, each hand balanced on a different set of blinking touch-pads. Still, the stars rattled dark and light in their streak-patterns, as the engines roared like a blast furnace.

"Go ahead, Mr. Spock," Kirk said, over the noise, almost as if the Vulcan had merely suggested taking the scenic way home on a bright calm day, even as the ship struggled, programming against new programming, her keel rising like a schooner in the waves. Both men were at the controls now, as General Hof retreated, or stumbled, back into the doorway, where he jammed himself between the narrow walls for stability.

A horrific, large ship seemed to curve around them, pouring thin and then bulbous and then into a laser-narrow line across their bow like a boneless dark fish. And, for a moment the two were intertwined before they went their separate ways, through the unreconstructed funhouse mirror of warp-space.

"I believe that that was the _Enterprise_, Captain," Spock said, over the cacophony of computer warnings and sirens, the loudest being the red alert. Kirk looked up at the flowing images, none of which could be separated from any of the swirl, to catch a glimpse of his starship—gone by now in a rush of colors and lights.

He tried to open a hailing frequency, but the communications panel had gone off-line as Spock worked to regain control.

"She was proceeding at approximately warp eight," Spock observed, though all the visual impressions outside the cockpit windows were like rivers of many colors.

"Take the engines off," Kirk said, his hands reaching across Spock's now, in growing impatience and concern. In the hands—or appendages—of an alien, this way, they could easily meet a very sudden end.

"Understood," the Vulcan said, now seeming to scan the pages of some invisible owner's manual in front of him, as his fists gripped the near and far edges of the readout console. Kirk would have apologized for interfering, if there'd been time, or need. If he didn't know his first officer better, he'd have guessed the Vulcan (for the briefest of moments) was paralyzed with astonishment at the swirling images around the ship, and no way to bring things back into order.

But his eyes seemed to dart back and forth, as if reading from that manual, or some textbook at Starfleet Academy, years ago, as his lips parted slightly in concentration, and he pushed this light-pad, and then those, and then another unlikely pattern. And it may have only been wishful thinking, but it seemed to Kirk that the images were slowly beginning to bend around, as if leading them down a straight path at last.

"Good work, Mr. Spock?" Kirk couldn't keep the breathless, questioning tone out of his voice, for he really had no idea what had just happened. Obviously, it seemed to him, the warp drive had gone dangerously out of balance. But, beyond that…

"'Any landing you can walk away from,' Captain," Spock nodded, remembering they were, at least, still alive, and therefore had a chance.

"Where are we, and where are we going?" Kirk practically fell into the padded chair that Vina had occupied most recently.

"To the home system of our guest, Krishtakonka, judging by the flow of the stars."

"Of course," Kirk nodded. "Tired of waiting on us, I suppose: air breathers, too vulnerable to changing minds; and changing circumstances."

"Indeed." Spock continued a manual diagnostic test of the entire computer console, talking as he examined each reaction to his fingertips on the light pads. "She does seem remarkably single-minded in pursuit of her own freedom, and desire to be one with her people again."

"Can't blame her," Kirk said, trying to work around Spock's long reach across the board, testing a few ancillary systems here and there, and trying to stabilize the navigation readouts. It was perfectly normal in victims of any kind of abuse, to have an overriding hatred of outside control.

"Can we get a message back to the ship?" Kirk wondered, looking out across the streamers of stars, which were almost back to the "normal" of warped space. Now they only wavered like streams of smoke, instead of a whole conflagration at once.

"Her ability to circumvent the highest security protocols of our systems did not seem to include the breaking of pre-programmed subspace silence," Spock whispered, as if the cephalopod could hear them, from meters away, and in her self-contained environment. "However, it may be possible to cross-reference communications with one of the other corrupted systems, to contact Mr. Scott for help."

"What were they doing alone, all the way out here?" Kirk wondered.

"And why didn't any other ships in the fleet try to stop them," Spock asked. The revelation that keepers must be on board other starships seemed to plunge the cockpit temperature down another five degrees.

"They should be out on maneuvers, with the rest of the fleet," the human said, as quietly as before, as he stared out the raked windows. "They'd be safe there… and Federation planets would be safe… from them…"

Now, neither man would touch the controls, out of sheer, pensive doubt over the strange appearance of the _Enterprise_. It was as if the one thing they'd always counted on in the past had suddenly become the greatest danger. And it broke Jim Kirk's heart in a way he'd never thought possible, as if his own country had betrayed him itself.

"I believe you told Vina," Spock said, as if his head were still spinning after they'd gone flying off course, "you would acquire a certain amount of blood—motile blood, one would assume—from one of the keepers, for her use."

Kirk nodded, as if he wished he hadn't said it at all, considering all their other problems. Then he heaved a great sigh and said, "I guess now I'm some kind of… vampire. Not exactly in the job description, is it?"

"We have been singularly unfortunate in our ability to get any sort of living tissue at all, thus far."

"Yes, Mr. Spock."

If McCoy were here, he might have asked, "then _why _did you promise you'd do it, Jim?" After all, it was almost unimaginable that they'd ever knowingly bring a keeper into their presence for any length of time.

"She's of much more use to us when she's their equal," Kirk said, hearing the question anyway, in his own mind—though his throat went tight with over this new obligation. "And, she wants to be young. And… beautiful. And who am I to say she doesn't deserve that, after being… robbed. After... all of this?"

Spock shifted uneasily in his co-pilot's seat. "She is a scientist, who qualified for a long and dangerous space mission. And as a scientist, she must also be a rationalist, as well. She must be fully aware of the natural process of things."

"Call me old fashioned," Kirk said, looking down, as if he'd become fascinated by one of the hundreds of little blinking lights at his fingertips, all of a sudden. "But—and I know this will come as something of a shock, Mr. Spock—I happen to enjoy the company of dewy-eyed young women. I'd appreciate it, if you'd try to keep that under your hat, please."

Needless to say, the Vulcan did not laugh at his little joke. Not to mention that, in the past four years of their five-year mission together, it was generally Mr. Spock who'd ended up with the dewy-eyed young women, while Kirk had generally got the hard-nosed realists, with the playful glint in her eye.

"And, don't forget… when we were crawling around, helpless in that space-elevator the other night, it was _her_ interference that helped get us out of there." Jim Kirk's hand came out, as if swiping at an invisible fly in the air, as he tried to work some kind of salesman's magic.

"Perhaps."

"They might still have some blood sample back at Starfleet, after that first one appeared," the captain added, trying not to sound too concerned.

Spock nodded very slightly, as if he didn't quite have the inclination to say "perhaps" again. But one eyebrow had crept up, as he considered the massive futility of this vain new quest. Both men looked out at the stars, which were almost back to steady streaks, and Spock gradually began checking various sub-routines in the ship's computers, looking for a weak point in the cephalopod's grasp on them, and a weak point (for their own sake) to break through and contact the _Enterprise_.

"Does it not seem… short-sighted… to you," Spock said, still examining the various computer readouts before him, "that she was so superficial, regarding her own appearance, that she would willingly surrender the rest of her years to captivity?"

"Good thing for Chris Pike," Kirk sighed, over the fate of his predecessor. "And, times change—women are much more independent-minded, these days, Mr. Spock."

Spock actually appeared exasperated at that, flinching slightly, and looking away.

"Think about it," Kirk insisted. "When I started out on the _Enterprise_, the popular thinking among women was that beauty was almost a competition—that all their self-worth came from all the… externals." He had inadvertently let his two hands come out in front of his chest in a gesture that was supposed to be emphatic, but only looked a little ribald.

"If we blame that on women, of course," Spock added.

"And Vina was a product of that time. Of course, she probably made a mistake not going away with Chris Pike when he left, after his first investigation of Talos. But you can't choose what your heart wants. Or, _I _can't choose what _my _heart wants." There was another thoughtful pause in the cockpit.

"We are currently travelling at warp thirteen point five," Spock recited, folding his hands in his lap. "Estimating time of arrival at the home world of our aquatic passenger in four days, seven hours, nineteen minutes and… twenty-one seconds."

"Thank you, Mr. Spock," Kirk smiled, graciously acknowledging his first officer's attempt to change the subject.

They flew on, like some madmen—"carrying a head," the old Earth saying went, as if bearing something too grotesque, and valuable, to hold on to for too long.

And now she really had escaped Talos, though her memories of Pike were growing dim. And any peace she might have had from an illusion of great beauty, that had so entranced him, was suddenly ripped away. Did it all balance out, freedom and just the buried recollections of his first officer, to carry her through, after all those years as a captive?

"It appears the _Enterprise _is now in hot pursuit," Spock said, as quizzically as his ancestry would allow.

"Are they hailing us?"

"Negative, they are increasing to warp factor ten."

That was just insane. And then Kirk's blood ran cold as he suddenly knew his own ship had come under the keepers' command.

"At least we've got some speed on our side," he said, very deeply worried about all these sudden turns of events, but somehow managing to stand aloof from them, for the moment.

"However we currently lack the power to control that speed," Spock said.

"Until we break through the computer lock," Kirk said, watching the stars zing past. The answer was obvious, that Spock would have to mind-meld again with Krishtakonka, if she would even bother to respond. The captain could stand out there in the gangway and pound on the glass till their engines cracked, and he knew he was powerless to change her mind. How does one flirt with an octopus, anyway? Very carefully, he assumed.

A few minutes later, Spock was pressed against the icy, dark glass. For a man from a desert world, it could not have been a comfortable position to be in. Kirk watched, a respectful few feet away, also silently urging Krishtakonka to come forward with her many boneless arms, from behind the veil of black water. General Hof was sleeping it off in his own cabin, next door. And when he checked on the sleeping Vina, the captain saw a motionless old woman, wrapped carefully in furs—only theoretically better off than she was on Talos.

He walked back up, quietly, to the cockpit. Now and then, the steady shifting of light pads on the control boards seemed to falter and hesitate, but not in any way that would indicate Spock had had any logical influence on their new pilot. Readings on the trailing _Enterprise _were spotty and, thank goodness, she was falling farther behind.

It was an odd reaction for him—the _Enterprise _had always been his fortress and salvation in the past. Now, he just wanted to see her getting smaller and smaller on the readouts, for all their sakes.

"No response to our hails, Mr. Scott," Uhura said calmly, though the ship was still at red alert.

"Aye, she may have us beat," Scotty muttered, leaning forward. "Mr. Chekov," he said, turning to his right on the bridge. "Any long-range on their destination?"

"Planetary system dead ahead, but no habitable worlds. One oceanic, possible deep sea life."

"And nothin' beyond that?"

"Not on our sensors, Mr. Scott."

The commanding officer nodded, and leaned back. By an incredible streak of luck, they'd intercepted messages within the Federation armada that seemed to have something to do with the death of the captain and Mr. Spock and, following great protestations from Starfleet, they'd been allowed to go chasing after a few meager clues. And now it all seemed to come down to this one ship, racing away from the apparent scene of the crime, at incredible speed.

"Mr. Scott, the engines are going into bypass mode," Lt. Tracy said, over his left shoulder.

"Aye, I know what my engines can and canna do, lad. Stay on course, ease her back to warp nine."

An almost audible sigh of relief swept across the bridge as the big engines cycled back to a more manageable ninth-factor of light speed. Ahead of the captain's chair, at the helm, Mr. Sulu blinked once or twice to refocus from the intense concentration required to maintain safe passage, so far from Federation space.

Of course, in reality, they'd been out of the armada for over a day now, and there had been no confrontations with the admiralty over any tantalizing rumors or their deep state of grief, on board the _Enterprise_. Such was the power of the keeper standing behind Mr. Scott, veins pulsing in its great pale skull.

**Chapter Thirteen **

Klingons, in a prison camp, are not appreciably any different from Klingons out amongst themselves, in the wild. They have a rough dignity, and a feral dominance, that both twist together in a kind of simmering disdain for the common decency of existence itself. And the sheer weight and limitations of being grim and powerful and cunning, all at the same time, also lends itself to a dour, ironic exasperation. Without wanting to sound racist about it, the strictures of that culture enforce their own kind of prison on each of them, under the best of circumstances. And, in that way, perhaps they weren't much different from Earth men, without the humanity of Earth women.

Initially, in the years after the first Klingon war, the Federation put its captives into bright, clean penitentiaries, pending negotiations and prisoner trades, and the like. But somehow, the more bright and colorful and cheerful the reform center, the more the Klingons seemed to grow outraged and miserable.

So, for Klingon honor, the Federation downgraded its handful of prison moons for their old enemy, into grimy-looking, chain-clanking, atmospherically dismal places. The best xenologists and psychologists were brought in to make modern prisons, in effect, more like harmless amusement parks for what the history books would call sado-masochists: with all of the sights and sounds of brutality and dehumanization of the Spanish Inquisition, but without any of the actual, physical cruelty. The Klingons instantly seemed much happier. Or, at least, more exuberant.

Stage actors were brought in as guards, to add a dash of pretend-viciousness to the long dull hours, to throw a few cups and do a bit of screaming now and then, or dress up as Klingons themselves, for mock brutality. The most expressive drag queens; and eager to please, little-known theatrical performers from the stellar provinces, were brought in for limited engagements and made-up to appear as guards or as newly-arrived Klingons themselves, and managed to turn 'pretend torture' into high opera. The actual Klingons, far from being scared into conformity, seemed to approve mightily. It pleased their sense of danger, and their wounded pride, and kept them strangely frisky, in a very Klingon sense of the word.

It was during one of these seemingly horrific mornings, on one of those very distant cold moons, when one Federation performer dragged another, "beaten" and "bloodied" down a cell-block hall for a little more "rough justice" with a foam-metal truncheon. Most of the real prisoners rushed to the bars of their cells to watch the ritual, and hear the anguished grunts of the new captive, and quietly lament the grave blow to their collective honor. In the long run, it seemed strangely therapeutic.

"Excuse me, but I'm afraid your forehead knuckle's come a bit loose," a strangely mild little voice said quietly, from the shadows of a cell at the very end of the block, as two of the costumed Federation men acted out another brutalization for the purging of restive Klingon souls.

The "guard" and the "Klingon" paused, exchanged an awkward look between themselves, and plunged right back into the beating, with the foam-metal club, which produced a satisfying "_thunk_" every time it landed against the victim's chest or back.

"Excuse me," the same quiet voice said, and the speaker leaned forward from the cell's shadows, to wave a few strangulated-looking Klingon fingers between the bars. "But, you know, a cursory understanding of basic anatomy would tell you you're probably only giving him a kind of sexual arousal from hitting him there."

Now the two actors in the cell-block hallway froze absolutely still, though the club wavered doubtfully in mid-air. The long trail of purple stage blood they'd so carefully brushed this way and that on the floor behind them now seemed ridiculous. It was still fairly certain that no one else had heard the critique from the Klingon in the shadows at this end of the prison wing. But any actor knows, and any audience knows, when a performer's being "called out" as a hack.

Taking turns, as furtively as possible, each of the two performers glanced cautiously into that dark cell. But the being inside was not like any Klingon they'd seen before: painfully slender, boyish—or, perhaps girlish, by Klingon standards—a Klingon who'd clearly been forced to abandon the whole ideal of being 'rough and tough and full of bluff.'

The club came down again, suddenly veering off toward a shoulder on the victim, away from that alleged Klingon "G-Spot," but produced an unexpectedly convincing little scream where it landed next. "Never deviate from a rehearsed stage battle," both actors knew, but it was too late to take it back.

There were a few more little blows, and a few more half-hearted little grunts and groans of false bravery, before the guard hauled his prisoner away, to some other part of the prison moon, to some other informal performance venue.

And very soon after that, the gangly young Klingon, who'd only tried to give them some helpful advice, was unlocked from his cell by two much more convincing fellows in red armored tunics, and summarily dragged away. It was the most mismatched contest that any of the other prisoners had seen that year, and was also far more abrupt. A few groans of disappointment down the cell-block suggested the bigger, nastier Klingons were hoping for a little more bloodshed. But the real guards simply dragged the real prisoner away, like the puppy that got into the baby food.

The warden sat for a few long minutes behind her desk, not looking up. It seemed she had all the goods on this under-weight Klingon, who now sat before her, between the two giant red-shirts towering over him. The prisoner didn't seem to notice them, and merely waited politely as the warden read and read, or seemed to, from computer files on the Klingon's capture and arrest and trial and imprisonment.

"We're going to have to move you," Corporal Jeannette Duvall sighed, at last. The wispy Klingon sat up, suddenly more interested.

"Look," he said, immediately concerned that things might get worse, "I didn't mean anything, I just thought it was a total fake is all."

"It _was_ a total fake," Corporal Duvall said, quietly, tapping on the glass of a wedge-pad on her desk.

"Well, there you are," the Klingon nodded, far more graciously than any other Klingon she'd ever seen before. Of course, a female warden had been chosen as a sort of mixed message for the other prisoners, that they weren't worthy of male domination, or that the Federation wasn't quite as ruthless as they might have been led to believe.

"Yes," the corporal nodded. "You can't stay here, if you're just going to cause trouble."

They sat in another long, interminable silence. Warden Duvall had gone over to reviewing the Klingon's personal files on another screen mounted to her desk.

"'Knowledge of Federation poets,'" she said, and almost laughed disdainfully. "'Knowledge of linguistics, knowledge of… Knowledge of fine wine and culinary. Knowledge of _swordsmanship'_?" Duvall looked up at the two security guards, who remained impassive, like mighty oaks.

"You're a very interesting fellow," she said, suddenly leaning back, as if some new prisoner had just been brought before her, and the minor annoyance of the last one had quite been forgotten.

"One does what one can," the wispy alien shrugged.

"'K'Toinne,'" the warden sighed. "That's your name?"

"Yes, madam."

"Sounds a bit French," she said, uncertainly, looking into the computer screen again.

"That would probably be "K'Antoinne, madam."

Her look became very severe now, as if he were mocking her.

"You know, there are far worse places you could be." She very easily stared him down.

"Yes, madam, I know." But he didn't seem to care for very long. He couldn't help smiling boyishly.

"Not sure how one of you slips through the cracks, in your culture."

"One has to be a bit hard, I suppose." It was almost as though he'd never thought about it, till now.

Corporal Duvall sighed again, and shook her head, realizing how it must have been for him on his own home world.

"Suppose that's why you're so thin," she said, very quietly, imagining that all his big brothers must have stolen his food from him, growing up. Something of a miracle he survived, let alone got himself into a Federation moon prison, tens of thousands of light years from home, barely in Federation territory at all.

"Beg your pardon, madam?"

"Nothing," she said, growing a bit less offended by this most un-Klingon of Klingons. Even considering all the wonders of the Universe, this was still something of a surprise. She called up another list of Federation prisons, and then a list of hospital-like penal colonies, where he might possibly blend-in with all the rest of the misfits.

"All right," Duvall said, clearing her throat. "Take him to shuttle dock eleven, they'll put him in order. Better take him the long-way 'round," the warden added, as a precaution. For just a second, she glanced at K'Toinne one more time. "I can't have you here, disrupting the social fabric. Such as it is."

Then she looked back at her computer screen, plainly forgetting him, and moving on to the regular affairs of the day. "Not that any of the others would give any particular credence to anything _you_ might say. But, well, you know."

K'Toinne clearly did not "know;" and his bony, articulated brow rose inquisitively. His mouth opened with one last question, just before both red-shirts grabbed him and dragged him away. It was just like being back home again, except the red-shirts didn't beat him up, of course.

Jim Kirk could only imagine how Spock's fingers must have gone numb, against the cold glass between him and the black water. The vapor of his breath danced slowly on the surface, like the skirts of Latin dancers. But, otherwise, there was nothing to indicate any connection with Krishtakonka. Now and then his orange fingers moved around on the glass, like antennae, searching for a signal of mental energy.

There was almost no point in going back up to the cockpit now—the _Enterprise _was falling farther and farther behind, and the cephalopod's world was still far from view. Why was his own starship following anyway? And each scenario he came up with ended with the same conclusion: someone, a keeper almost certainly, had seized control and was hunting them down.

And even if he could communicate with Scotty, was there anything he could say to prevent the _Enterprise _from blasting them to plasma? Something had tricked the chief engineer into this mad pursuit—or he'd been shoved out of the picture, or… It could be anything, and there was no use speculating.

Except, of course, that he had nothing else to do and, conceivably, he might stumble on a strategy before it was too late, if he could only rack-up enough scenarios and "if-then" games before they reached Krishtakonka's planet and… well, that opened up a whole 'nother series of speculations. But as that new world ahead was not already known as hostile, he could only decide not to worry about it yet.

If he were Scotty, he imagined he'd have given the warp drive a rest, and must now be working with Mr. Sulu to try to map out some kind of short-cutting around the gravitational terrain of space, to catch up and (unwittingly) destroy their own captain and first officer. At least the little scout ship had the sudden advantage of an unpredictable alien mind directing them on its own familiar path homeward, through its own neighborhood, so to speak… so they ought to stay out ahead, at least until they dropped out of warp. And, if there was any doubt about their destination, it might make any inter-stellar short-cuts by the _Enterprise_ a little more problematic. He hoped.

Pursued by his own ship, for reasons he almost had to assume were hostile, after they broke formation with the rest of the fleet. And he tried to imagine some even greater chase to come, as the renegade _Enterprise—_assuming she _was _considered a renegade now—might be brought to heel by the multiplied forces of the fleet. But, so far, the rest of the fleet was not chasing the _Enterprise_. And what did that mean? He shook his head, wondering how much more "out of hand" all this could get.

He tried to imagine his own ship being hunted down Federation dreadnaughts, with their monstrous, blunderbuss engines, and he wondered whether that would really help him and Spock accomplish their mission or not. How many different ships might the keepers be on already, if there were still thousands of them, at last word, when they teetered on the brink of extinction?

And, if Spock was right, the rest of the fleet wasn't trying to catch the _Enterprise_ because there must be at least one other keeper on at least one more of the lead ships in that great armada, out beyond the edges of the Federation. It's the only way his ship could have fled, without triggering some sudden override from fleet command. And that would mean that ship or two or more still in the armada might be turned against other innocent planets, closer to home than just Krishtakonka's. He wished Spock would make some kind of a breakthrough to her, so they could map out some kind of a plan.

He resumed his quiet, watchful post over the twinkling computer light-pads up in the cockpit. There was still no sign that Krishtakonka had relinquished any control, but he didn't really have anything else to do, and General Hof (his recent drinking companion) was still snoozing on his hammock, just as Vina lay, visibly nearer to death on her own. For Vina and Hof, at least, there was still a curfew on passion.

And maybe that was it—maybe he had to either excite some new passion in Krishtakonka, or wear her out on the one that drove her to such extremes. Or, maybe she was merely hibernating while the ship did all the work for her.

"Computer," he said, quietly.

"_Working_," the familiar automated Starfleet voice replied.

"Status of self-destruct program?"

"_This ship contains no self-destruct protocols_."

That was almost worse than what he had in mind—what if a keeper managed to take control of this vessel, too, as a last stand? Oh, well.

"Why is this ship under alien command," he asked, after a moment.

"_Ship functioning normally_," came the computer's reply, cool and efficient.

"Are we still on the randomized map, per our original mission?" He tried to keep a note of frustration out of his voice.

There was a strange new series of light-patterns on the broad control panel, as if the computer had suddenly suffered a crisis of confidence—and gone into a frantic diagnostic mode. He watched, as if he'd dropped his last credit into a very impressive slot machine, and was waiting for a payout that might never come. The lights just kept shifting blinking rapidly, as if a great pile of credits was about to come pouring out, in some strange new jackpot, at any moment. And then, he thought he could almost see two conflicting sets of flashing patterns on the sweeping console, as if two opposing programs were being run at once, struggling for supremacy.

A painful, choking doubt came into his mind, and into his belly, too—what if he managed to destroy another magnificent computer with his questioning, and his reasoning? He'd be—they'd _all _be—a very tiny asteroid belt, broken to bits in the middle of nowhere, if the ship were torn apart in the conflict played out in its own computer: broken to bits at warp 13.5.

He chose his next words very carefully, looking down at his boots at first.

"Resume course… on original mission… using randomized map." Now he was staring grimly out the cockpit windows again.

Another horrendously complex series of computer calculations was indicated by the rapid patterns of lights on the controls at his fingertips. They'd tried to accomplish the same takeover with endless variations, manually tapped-in but, somehow, the verbal approach seemed to appeal to the computer on an entirely different security platform. Clearly, he'd underestimated the little ship, just as he'd underestimated General Hof.

There was a deep, anguished cry from behind him, down the gangway.

_Stay with her, Spock_, Kirk thought, watching the computer, like the Vulcan, being tied in knots.

"Show warp map between the _Enterprise _and our destination," Kirk said, as if the situation were almost commonplace.

A series of projected images, like stalactites representing gravity wells, appeared in mid-air in front of him, with a dot indicating the great starship on the left, then his own little scout ship somewhere in the middle, and another dot all the way over on the right of the starmap, representing Krishtakonka's planet.

"Show all faster routes, at maximal speeds, for each ship."

"_Navigation programming unavailable at this time_."

_How rude_, Kirk thought mildly, though he also thought he heard rough, heavy breathing from his first officer amid-ships, pressed against the aquarium panel. It was slightly annoying to realize his own second-in-command had more tenacity than the computer they all relied on for safe passage.

So they just had to stay on the course programmed by the mysterious cephalopod, knowing that at any moment the _Enterprise_, with its greater computing power, and its brilliant navigator, could leap ahead, and he wouldn't even know how or when, until the very instant when the towering warship loomed before them, powering-up its phaser banks. He began working out the different "overtake" routes in his own head, which would take much longer, agonizing over the game of leap-frog that must be underway to stop them.

"Krishtakonka," he said at last, throwing a switch to open the translator they'd used before, "we have to delay your homecoming—our heavy cruiser is on its way to your world, in pursuit of us, and is almost certainly operating under the control of the keepers."

"All of you," the watery voice came back in a moment, "are too easily misled. None of you is a reliable partner in this effort."

"But the _Enterprise _has become a most reliable… _partner_ in the destruction of all five of us," Kirk insisted, leaning in to the computer board, as if his emotional intensity might somehow be transmitted along with his words.

"In the unlikely event," Krishtakonka replied in a very matter-of-fact way, "that your warship could overtake this vessel, I am content to ram its control deck. This should prevent any keeper from confining me, or any of my family, ever again."

As he considered this, he noticed the little "blip" of light on the left of the projected starmap made its first half-diagonal leap, in an apparent series of moves by the starship to get around and in front of them. He tried to guess Sulu's next move, so far away, and his eyes darted around the plunging "negative landscape" of deep holes where stars and planets and black holes were all detected, and which must be avoided at all costs.

"You see they're already plotting to prevent your reunion with your people."

No reply from the aquatic passenger.

"Ask yourself," Kirk insisted again, "if those many years of confinement have betrayed you with madness and rage and impatience. Ask yourself if you could possibly hope to best a much greater ship in any kind of conflict you're capable of imagining."

Spock gave another tormented groan from down the gangway.

"Ask yourself if you're… _swimming_ in keepers' waters… or the waters of your ancestors'. Or if you might finally, truly be swimming free, in waters of your own devising!" He prayed the release she'd had, and the autonomy they'd given her on board would finally register in her soul, above her hatred of confinement.

Then there was a tremendous wracking of the deck, and the window frames above, and he lost his balance over the controls for a moment. It was like the engines had finally broken down, in one brutal shock, and the star trails were sucked backward into tiny spherical fires all around. And yet again, the _Enterprise _advanced toward them again on the holo-map.

"_Resuming randomized course_," the ship's computer voice said, matter-of-factly. After a moment, the warp drive kicked in again, and the engines' roar climbed two octaves, ringing through the hull.

"We've lost them, Mr. Scott," Sulu said, plainly frustrated.

"Aye," the commanding officer nodded. It was a long shot to begin with, starting out so far behind.

At the science station, Mr. Chekov seemed just slightly dazed for a moment. Then, he pushed a few buttons and called up another starmap on the screen above his head.

"Mr. Scott," he said.

"What is it, lad?"

"I have a schematic of the Class-M worlds nearest to their last known position, seer."

Scotty pulled himself out of the captain's chair and stepped up behind the helmsman, who was doubling as science officer. Both of them looked up and studied the map for a moment, and both of them had the same slightly glassy-eyed expression, as if they'd come under a spell.

The keeper who stood in the center of the bridge watched knowingly, and saw which systems on the map harbored his own fellow creatures, at last word. It was only a matter of a telepathic "nudge" to make the two Starfleet officers aware of the general importance of those systems, too, to collect his brethren, and deliver them to some other vulnerable worlds, where they could continue their work.

"That one, and possibly that one," Chekov said, his hand rising to point to the map, with a strange numbness in his arm.

"Aye, feed it through to the helm. Mr. Sulu, plot a course to the nearest one first, best possible speed."

"Aye, Mr. Scott."

Catching the captain and Mr. Spock's killers would be harder than the commander first thought, but all the sweeter when the moment finally came. Sulu fed the new coordinates into the navigation computer. The blackened _Enterprise _streaked ahead, curving off in a new direction.


	8. Chapters 14 and 15

**Chapter Fourteen **

"How are you, Spock?" Kirk asked, kneeling by the Vulcan in the narrow passageway. All three of their passengers seemed to have gone to sleep, and Spock looked as though he might join them at any moment, closing his eyes and leaning against the relative warmth of a metal bulkhead. The black water doorway across the little gangway towered over them, dark and rectangular and still defiant.

"She has developed an extreme antipathy toward any form of control or containment," he replied, very quietly, "for even the noblest of reasons…" Then, his tone changed to utter bewilderment: "It seems intensely illogical, given the inevitable confinement that would be required during any rescue attempt, mounted by non-amphibians." Even if he had the worst imaginable headache, his vocabulary had clearly not abandoned him.

"But it is… understandable," Kirk said, also sitting on the grated deck path, as he weighed Krishtakonka's extreme distrust. "When everyone goes off in search of their wildest dreams… everyone else just loses value… and all the usual imperatives just… fall by the wayside."

"Like addiction, or extreme religiosity," Spock almost whispered, and it seemed he would have liked some kind of a drug himself, after a violent mind-meld.

"Yes, Mr. Spock," he sighed, "like addiction." And he knew that the addict would either have to save himself, or be buried alive, if they couldn't stop this strange invasion. And this time it would be a trillion lives that might be compromised.

"And," Kirk finally sighed, "the _Enterprise _is after us."

"A singularly unpleasant distinction," the Vulcan nodded.

When Spock had gone up to the cockpit, and Kirk was quite sure he was heading back to the one cabin left unoccupied, he heard a small voice out of Vina's quarters. He stepped back and politely tapped the edge of the open doorway. She seemed to shift under the fur, in her hammock.

"May I come in?"

There was a quiet sigh from the shadows, and he came in to kneel by her head.

"I'll never get him back, will I?" It was not a scientific question.

"I don't know," Kirk had to admit, as life always seemed to made up of bumping back and forth between the unbearable and the impossible, and trying to find something worth hanging on to in-between.

"So much wasted time," she said, twisting her head till it slowly came out from under the soft coat.

"Lots of people get caught, lots of people get imprisoned," he said, reassuringly.

"Not scientists," she murmured, a little smile crossing her lips.

"I think you'll find," he smiled, "they're usually the only ones who survive!"

"Then I'm a great success," she said, managing a small, bitter laugh, as she disappeared beneath the imitation animal skins once more. He stood up, not wanting to exhaust her, simply by rearranging that coat again.

"I'll make you young again," he said, almost to himself. There had to be second chances for people like her, somehow, even if it meant feeding off the blood of her captors.

"It doesn't matter," she said, very like the wind rustling through dead corn stalks.

"It matters to me, and it would matter to Chris." He left her as quietly as he could. Then he paused, halfway down to the empty cabin, and turned around, knowing he wouldn't really be able to sleep.

When he stepped up into the cockpit, he saw that Spock had the map projection up, floating over the control board again. The plunging gravity wells still stood like a dense forest between them and the _Enterprise, _but in a moment, Kirk knew the map had changed, and there were somewhat fewer stars and black holes and deep space objects being shown, without his even having to count them all up. The map had simply been enlarged, as the dots (the ships) seemed to drift across, from left to right.

"Mr. Sulu is making excellent progress," the Vulcan said, as the captain slid into the pilot's seat.

"What's that," Kirk asked, innocently, pointing to the little streak of a ship passing a day's travel-time away, arcing across the "south" of the map ahead of them.

"Going by registry, it is a prison ship, transferring convicts from one secure facility to another."

"Ah," Kirk said, as if that sounded mildly preferable to what they were shackled to at the moment. And, just as he watched the third, smaller craft on the holographic map, gently careening between the stars, the _Enterprise _jumped forward again, advancing nearly a quarter-way across the field.

Both commanders sat in stunned silence for a moment, studying the maneuver. It was most unexpected. Then the glowing, 3-D map zoomed in, and the gravity-wells behind the _Enterprise _disappeared, even as the ones still between them seemed to expand, along with the distance between each remaining object. And, once again, the _Enterprise _appeared to be all the way at the left end of space, though the illusion was of little comfort.

"She looks like she's dying," Kirk said, thinking of Vina.

"She has had an exceptionally difficult life—although she has made impressive strikes against her captors."

"Did she make a mistake, all those years ago," Kirk wondered, "staying behind?"

"Not, perhaps, from Captain Pike's perspective," Spock said, glancing down at his hands, folded in his lap. "They had great… emotional riches… in their final years together—years which may have seemed like decades, or even centuries, in their own minds."

"Then why does she seem so much more miserable now?"

"Her age and state of medical neglect, combined with her lack of physical activity, can hardly be said to promote a positive outlook," Spock said.

"And… she's still in mourning."

"Indeed."

"After all they'd… 'given' her," Kirk said bitterly, looking out across the stars. Sometimes even the Universe itself seemed strangely disappointing.

The _Enterprise _jumped again on the holographic map, closer to the half-way point, and both men fell silent again, in amazement. And Jim Kirk wished, for the first time ever, that Mr. Sulu had not been such a brilliant tactician. The map zoomed in again, automatically, and the forest of spindly gravity threats to warp space spread apart proportionately, even as the deep wells themselves expanded like dripping candles in mid-air, and much smaller needles in the time-space landscape began to appear behind them. Now they could make out the graphic representation of the saucer and engines of the great ship, and actually see it crawling forward, across this part of the galaxy.

"Computer," Jim Kirk said, at last.

"_Working_."

"Is there any way to determine whether or not a keeper of the Talosian race may have got on board the Starship _Enterprise_?"

Spock nodded slightly, approving the question, although he didn't seem to have any theories about the alien penetration yet, himself.

"_Within the parameters established by previous expeditions and reports, and classified information filed during this mission by the present crew… affirmative._"

"How?"

"_The precise answer in this case is unknown. However, recent flight path deviations, to take up pursuit of this vessel, coupled with the starship's subspace silence, suggest the _Enterprise _may no longer be operating under command of Starfleet officers. Further, subspace echoes indicate a series of inquiries and commands from the flotilla, following the _Enterprise'_ departure._"

"Recommendations?"

"_Isolate the enemy_."

There wasn't much either officer could say to that.

"Computer," Spock said, loud and clear, as if to dispel their worries, "can starship programming overcome humanoid interference, to protect Federation planets from their own warships?"

"_Unknown. At least three vessels carry computer experts with a grade-five clearance, which could be used to overcome some or most programmed safeguards_. _A compromised individual with a fifth-level clearance could theoretically overcome programmed safeguards._"

Spock, of course, held a grade-seven computer clearance—at a time when Vulcans were somewhat rare in the fleet.

"'Isolate the enemy,'" Kirk repeated. He allotted himself a second or two of feeling helpless, before his eye fell on that little streak on the star-map, to the south of both ships: the prison transport cutting across between what was his and… what once was his.

"Spock," he said, feeling a sudden, almost erratic sense of inspiration.

The Vulcan looked up at the passing stars, waiting for what he fully expected to be another outrageous, though possibly ingenious, human idea. Then, knowing James T. Kirk quite well enough by now, the Vulcan began plotting a course to that transport vessel.

A day later, they dropped out of warp and pulled up to docking position along-side the prison ship, which had come to a full stop at Kirk's request. Then, barely ten minutes later, the spy craft darted back into warped space, many times faster than the lumbering old transfer ship that doggedly went its way. And the _Enterprise _altered course, once again chasing after the super-fast black ship.

"Disease vectors," Spock said, as he and the captain settled in to their prison cell, on board the penal transport ship. He had an outdated tricorder in his lap, from prison stores, and was flipping through various screens on the video frame on top.

Kirk pretended to be interested, but without much enthusiasm: barely raising his eyebrows in response to the science officer's cryptic remark. But he couldn't take his eyes off the doorway, out of habit. It was certainly not his first time in jail, though the transport's captain had graciously left the force-field turned off.

"Yes, Mr. Spock?" The silence was becoming impolite, as far as the Earthman was concerned.

"The spread of the keepers' influence, through Federation space: it is not unlike a contagion, though we stopped their fastest mode of transportation, back on Talos."

Kirk nodded, wondering how much worse things would be if they hadn't.

"And the computer seemed to say we should treat it like a disease," Kirk said, remembering the phrase "isolate the enemy."

"It might be instructive to get our base-line psych-readings, in case of further exposure."

"Go ahead, Mr. Spock," Kirk shrugged, and the Vulcan lifted the tricorder to Kirk's skull. After touching a few little controls, Kirk could thought he could feel a faint vibration of the scanner against his head, for about ten seconds. Spock re-set the controls and duplicated the procedure against his own head.

Just then, there was the sound of a pair of boots marching, and also the boots of a smaller man, shuffling awkwardly, in the corridor outside their cell. Both _Enterprise _commanders instinctively rose to see what would happen, though they could easily step in or out of the tiny quarters any time they wished.

A prison steward went by, with a slender young Klingon held by the upper arm. Now Kirk and Spock knelt in the doorway, with that momentary hesitation as they made sure the security force-field had really been turned off first.

As Kirk watched the Klingon (K'Toinne, of course) heading down the cell-block with the guard, Spock paused to lift the tricorder up, over Kirk's shoulder. A few other prisoners, here and there in their own cells, were also peering out.

When Kirk turned back to Spock, the tricorder was up in his face, between them.

"What is it," he asked, knowing not to be offended at the involuntary scanning by his logical friend.

"Merely a theory, Captain," Spock answered, crouching like an orangutan, back to his corner in the cell, already poring over the readings. Kirk stood up, leaning out to look back and forth, across to the other cell door openings, at the convicts who'd just watched the Klingon being hurried past. It just seemed like a hopeless bunch of men, like misfired rockets, who'd banged against some wall or smashed into the ground or been blown-up after launch too many times, till they were finally swept up for some psychological re-fitting and re-tooling at some Federation security clinic. He tried not to take it too personally that he, himself, had probably spent more time in more jail cells than most of these other men combined.

But, a Klingon? How odd, and strangely, violently, disgustingly glamorous, on a prison scow like this. Kirk tentatively stepped out of the cell, and walked down the brightly-lit cell passage, to follow. Spock glanced up to see the captain start out on his way, after K'Toinne, and nodded in silent approval. He returned to his psych readings, from the moment the captain laid eyes on one of man's greatest adversaries.

"Where d'ya think you're going!" a prison guard soon demanded, as Kirk turned the first corner, into another wing of prison cells. K'Toinne was nowhere in sight.

"I'm Captain James T. Kirk, of the Starship _Enterprise_," he answered, full of cool self-assurance.

"Listen, bud, _all _these guys think they're Captain James T. Fuckin' Kirk, of the goddam Starship _Enterprise_. Now get back to your cell!"

"I was just looking for the ship's… infirmary," he offered, spreading his hands in a gesture of helpless, polite beseeching (for this seemed to be the 99% of the real life of James T. Kirk that no one ever bothered to think about).

"That way," the guard said, half-nodding toward another white corridor, branching off from the end of this one.

"_I'm Captain James T. Kirk_," one of the prisoners in one of the cells whined, mockingly, as he passed.

"In your dreams," the captain muttered, as he turned the corner.

There it was, down at the end, with a little red flag above the wide doorway. Vina would be in there, getting the care and treatment she needed to hang on a bit longer. And, perhaps the Klingon had just been brought on board, and was about to get a standard entrance exam. And General Hof was somewhere around here, too, tucked away in another little cell—hopefully he could see the humor of it all, sprung from a little terrarium on Talos IV, only to spend a week in an even smaller cabin on an unmarked little ship, only to end up in yet another cell, streaking slant-wise across the galaxy. But it should be over soon, he told himself. However long "soon" would be.

He stepped farther into the infirmary to see if he could spot her, but it was all draped-off beds and garbled voices talking through little speakers, and trustees pushing little carts here and there. The buzzing and beeping of medical equipment filled the air. All the technology seemed about fifteen years behind the medical operations of a great starship.

He took another few steps down between the beds and drapes and carts, until he found her, sound asleep, hair a mess, that terrible purple scar now plainly evident in the harsh lighting, running down the middle of her face, and tubes likewise running in and out of her body.

He knelt down and rubbed her shoulder. Her eyes half-opened but, if she saw him, it didn't seem to matter. The eyes slid shut again, like twin drawers closing in a coroner's storage freezer. Gingerly, he kissed her forehead, and she seemed to sigh quietly, from a quintillion miles away.

Now Kirk went out looking in more private draped-off areas for the Klingon. He felt a strange rush of excitement, hunting his natural enemy, with a kind of streamlined mental simplicity that he hadn't felt since the mission began. And behind him, other heads popped out to watch, the trustees and a nurse or two, as he kept on searching.

The black spy ship went roaring toward the green ocean world, and didn't drop out of warped space till the last second. And the _Enterprise_, also black-skinned in mourning for Kirk and Spock, was right behind. Both ships raced around the glittering watery sphere for horrific braking power, and Krishtakonka put the smaller vessel into a crazy spin, that seemed to drive her into the upper atmosphere much faster than expected, and at a much sharper angle, too. The black hull glowed a brighter and brighter shade of cherry red.

The _Enterprise _was already firing phasers and clouds boiled away to mere borders of themselves as the last moment of the chase played out.

"She's heading underwater, sir," the Russian called, over the ringing of the red alert on the bridge, as the main viewer skewed down beneath the clouds, and they dashed across a thin layer of open air.

"Chop her up for stew, helmsman," the Scotsman said, rising to his feet as the viewscreen showed less and less horizon, and more and more of the deep water below.

"Slowing to point oh-one of impulse," Sulu said, to keep them from plunging in after.

"Give 'em something to remember us by, Mr. Chekov," Scotty said, as a full barrage of photon torpedoes went shooting out from the _Enterprise_.

But it was too late, and the little black ship, confirmed by Starfleet to be carrying the killers, skimmed across, then down below, the waves. There was a trace of a steaming black shadow, and then nothing, even as the torpedoes slammed like hot coals into the water: first two, then two more, then two more.

A long five seconds passed, and the first of a series of great geysers of explosions roared up into the air, to build a Coliseum worthy of Olympus, made of steam with fiery rings, rising high into the sky. The black _Enterprise _hovered there, in the midst of this mad, shimmering temple of geysers and crowns of charged particles that hovered up and down the height of them. Two more geysers, then two more. The explosions were farther and farther undersea, as the _Enterprise _hung motionless above its unreachable quarry, between steaming columns, a thousand feet high, till they merged with the roof of the clouds.

No one had to tell Mr. Scott the killers had gotten away. Readings far below the surface showed strange lattice-work grottos, and volcanic towers hollowed out like skyscrapers, miles below the waves: seemingly delicate structures under the impossible weight of so much water. And somehow the murderers had found refuge down there. Scotty let his fist hammer lightly against his trouser leg as the seconds ticked by.

Then, to their complete astonishment, the little black ship was spotted again, under water but rising fast.

"Mr. Scott!" Sulu exclaimed.

"We may not get another chance, laddy," he said, and Chekov pressed the phaser command button again, as both ships rose out into clear orbit again, and the pleasant green sky sunk below, along with the ocean world, and as the columns of steam wore away in the wind, like ruins. Far above, phasers flashed back and forth like the blades of swords.

Then the little ship exploded into warp drive again, and the _Enterprise _was on the chase, for the fourth day running: back toward Federation space now, with the smaller one gaining more and more straight-line distance ahead of the starship.

_The keeper, standing silent on the bridge the whole time, knew the little ship was unoccupied, having deposited Krishtakonka back home at last, for some incomprehensible reunion with its own civilization. But he also knew the small ship darting ahead would still, most likely, lead them back to James T. Kirk and Captain Pike's Vulcan, Mr. Spock. _

_This small diversion was of only temporary importance, and his brother-keepers were still making progress on the other star-ships, in his absence. The keeper nodded in silent satisfaction at the thought. Starfleet had left their kind to their own demise on Talos IV, and now the situation was reversed and, thanks to Captain Pike, this human empire would soon taste extinction itself._

If Starfleet had understood the way the danger spread, it probably would never have taken the precaution to mass so many powerful ships together, even so far from the Federation home worlds. Another hypnotized pilot delivered another keeper to the USS _Ticonderoga _in the great armada, and that ship's transporter chief was deceived into bringing this latest arrival on board, frail and tiny in his silvery robes. And now a serious plan could finally take shape, in the same "disease vector" model that Mr. Spock had only just perceived. The Vulcan had also just barely managed to guess at a solution, though it was too late for many, who must die at the hands of their own mighty "protectors."

In just eight hours, six more keepers had joined the first one, within the armada. They were distributed quietly, one by one, into the largest ships. And then (in a variation on the invisible takeover of the _Enterprise_), the captains and first officers were lured down to their respective brigs, and security teams were made to believe they were just particularly disorderly cadets who were to be given the icy treatment—silence and contempt and minimal food and water. The captains and first officers, meantime, were lulled into a long, long sleep, while their crews believed them to have been killed in some reprehensible (but unexplainable) sneak attack.

The three mighty starships that remained in the long chain of vessels also adopted "protocol eight," mourning the "loss" of their top commanders, and their hulls shimmered from battleship gray to the trappings of grief. Then, they sped away, as one.

Their warp engines blasted them outside the fabric of visible space, toward the home worlds, where they would begin raining-down misguided justice, just like the _Enterprise_, on that innocent ocean world.

It was as if every man had fallen into the love of his own dreams or, at least, the dreams manufactured by someone else, and managed by the keepers—though it somehow made everything else, and everyone else, a little less real. And in just this way friends would soon become strangers, isolated or presumed dead; and acquaintances like cold enemies: from the simplest, hidden misunderstandings: like electricity from unseen wires, imaginations of rejection and remoteness became unfair hatreds. And, just as Scotty had held on to his own sadness in the captain's chair till it grew to a vengeance, no man would dare speak of any grievance, for fear of showing weakness; until each grievance gave birth to a thousand echoes of discontent.

Quite simply, the keepers did not need those underground cells anymore, with small dramas played out in dreams for their amusement. Whole planets could now be strung together like playthings. And, just as men once sought to be like gods on a billion new Edens, the keepers would stand over each, provoking proud withdrawal, and icy desolation, that steadily grew into war; as proud men destroyed themselves.

"A price too high to pay," Jim Kirk remembered the Imurian saying, before those unexpected masters of illusion were swept away by some unseen force themselves. He nodded, and continued his search for the Klingon.

**Chapter Fifteen **

"What if Saldana was just… the testing ground… a laboratory for the keepers, in their new freedom," Kirk thought to himself, as he went around and around in the prison transport, hoping for his stealthy scout ship to return like a boomerang, while he looked for that strangely thin Klingon he was sure he'd seen, being led somewhere by a guard. Spock was back in their holding cell, not "held," exactly, but in the grip of some new understanding of the problem. Meanwhile, what if every planet in the Federation was going down the same drain as that farm world, cut off and left to barbarism?

What had Mayor Holdenreid said? "It was as if you'd suddenly come to represent everything I hated," or became the enemy of everything the mayor stood for, or thought he stood for. Round and round Jim Kirk went, past prison cells that looked exactly like the same ones he passed twenty minutes ago, and past the same old human pride and hatred, too, except these men could not escape.

Now he was sure he was going around in circles, looking for that Klingon. Finally, he stopped at a guard desk—possibly the same as the first one, with a new guard taking over.

"Excuse me, sir," he said, once again being the Jim Kirk no one ever thought about, humble and low. "Is there a Klingon prisoner on board, and could you tell me where he's been taken?"

The grizzled soldier at the desk looked up, as if he was angry, and always had been.

"It's just this… thing I have," Kirk said, running out of words to explain his strange interest. "I've always felt a kind of deep… distrust… a need to contain, or…"

"You're that fella, thinks he's James T. Kirk," the guard squinted, a cynical smile twisting his mouth.

"Why, yes, I am," Kirk said, surprised to have to admit it. He almost felt as if two of his own red-shirts would step forward at any moment to brandish their gigantic, muscled chests in the guard's direction, to put him in his place. But, Kirk realized, he'd forgotten to pack them along for the trip.

"Ah, Captain Kirk, I've been looking everywhere for you!" an older man's voice said, from behind. The guard jumped up, his face turning as red as a Martian carrot.

"Oh, Warden," Kirk said, turning and forgetting the guard's contempt right away. "I was looking—I thought I saw a Klingon being escorted—"

"You did, you did! Please come this way," Warden M'rook said, and led the Caesar of the stars down a side hall. The guard remained standing till they were completely out of sight, and even a few moments after.

K'Toinne was sitting, trying to look relaxed and at least a bit refined, in the center of a plain little, over-lit room, all by himself. He turned politely when the door swung open behind him. He was even more slender than Mr. Spock, and only slightly taller than Jim Kirk.

"You look disappointed," K'Toinne said, standing deferentially, as Kirk entered, and the warden held the door. The Klingon had a pair of saddle-bracket handcuffs on his wrists.

"Uh, no…" Kirk said, although he glanced back over his shoulder, to make sure the warden had put him in the right room. M'rook merely nodded, and left, quietly shutting the door. The Earthman was left alone inside with his "adversary."

"I suppose you're wondering how I ended up here," K'Toinne began, helpfully, and completely devoid of the usual Klingon rant or rancor.

"Believe me," Kirk said, squeezing around him in the cubicle, to a slightly more roomy corner, "I'm wondering the same thing about myself."

"Well, I assume you must have 'despoiled' some fair maiden, who turned out to be the admiral's own lovely daughter," K'Toinne said, matter-of-factly, as if romance and revelry were the common currency of all starship captains.

"Well, not yet. Not as far as I know." Kirk leaned against a little desk, where a stenographer might sit during some dreadful confession.

"Then it's a secret mission," K'Toinne declared, leaning forward, and surprising Kirk just for a second. K'Toinne's eyes grew large, realizing he'd hit upon the truth. Suddenly, he was the one conducting the interrogation.

"You're on the run," K'Toinne continued, more carefully, standing and pacing around his chair in a very tiny circle, "from some giant, hideous beast… with perhaps a giant sort of…" words were beginning to fail him now, as his hands clawed the air menacingly, "or maybe just a giant eyeball, with… sort of… blood vessels for claws! Or some giant robot that turns itself into some sort of… other, even bigger… giant robot…"

Kirk shook his head in dismay, and K'Toinne squinted his eyes in disbelief.

"Don't tell me it's some kind of… little old lady, mocking all your dreams and hopes and ambitions—because it sounds rather like me dear old mother, back home, on dear old Klingonia. That's what we call it. Well, all right, that's not really what we call it. But it does sound rather _exactly_ like her!" He pointed a dark finger at Kirk's chest, to drive home his point.

Kirk nodded, and looked away, for K'Toinne's description of a keeper seemed fairly, functionally, close to the truth. The Klingon's moment of triumph was palpable, and he grinned a surprisingly Klingon-like grin for a change, throwing out his narrow little chest as if he'd pound it with a mailed fist.

"They're causing a… surprising amount of damage," the captain sighed.

"Well, I'm not surprised, you ought to see my old mum in action." He took up the opposite wall, to lean against, both men staring off into the corners with their arms folded. The whole thing would be ridiculous, if it hadn't been for all the dead bodies on Wrigley beneath the skywalks; or on Saldana, in the recycling vats; or the frozen members of the boarding parties in the armada, materialized out in empty space, after the _Enterprise _had unexpectedly warped away.

"Well, then, I'm your perfect warrior," K'Toinne said, at last, excited and convinced it was the hand of fate.

"For what?"

"I don't know, but I'm well sick of all these prisons and jail cells, I can tell you that."

Kirk actually thought about it for a moment, when a quote from two years ago popped into his mind: _"They can't see through strong emotions."_ Vina had said it, as part of Spock's evidence, when he took Chris Pike back to Talos, breaking the quarantine.

Well, this particular Klingon certainly did have strong feelings… if only about his mother, who somehow resembled a keeper. And, more importantly, Kirk's own crew, if they were ever reunited, would certainly have a fairly strong reaction to K'Toinne… But if that line of reasoning actually worked, they were going to need a lot more Klingons. The door open up again, behind him, and a great furry paw grabbed Kirk's shoulder.

"Where have you been!" General Hof demanded. But, far from seeming aggravated, he clasped Kirk close to his chest and slapped him on the back. It was so hard to tell whether a Tellarite might be glad to see you or not. Either way, their fangs were bared, and their guttural gasping could have meant anything. Now, Hof held Kirk out at arm's length, as if seeing him for the first time in years.

"I was afraid you'd turned old, like the girl!" The Tellarite said, examining him for signs of similar decrepitude.

"Yes, well, prison'll do that to a girl," K'Toinne said, glancing through the door, as if his good fortune might end as suddenly as it began.

It was only then that Kirk realized how strange things had become, and how each one of them must look quite insane, at any given moment. And he wasn't sure if that was a bad thing, or not. He marveled at how Hof, or K'Toinne, or Vina most of all, had gone all the way through even to this sorry stage of success at all, against all odds. In the harsh prison-ship lighting, even Mr. Spock might seem mad too, in a particular, detached way. But, somehow, they'd all interlocked and become some kind of workable unit under impossible circumstances, against seemingly insurmountable foes, who were eager to crush them for their tiniest weakness.

And it made him happy. He didn't know why. This newest, ridiculous person in their midst should have made things worse; and the loss of one gentle alien, Krishtakonka, to her own home world, should have made him sad—she didn't trust them, but he could hardly blame her for that. And, at least had the clarity to see herself through to her own ambition, at the end of her long distress.

He was only assuming, of course, that she _had _succeeded in returning to her faraway world, her completely different reality—but he believed she had the intelligence and self-sustaining commitment to get there, even if events somehow blocked her here and there, along the way.

"Come on," he said, leading the two aliens out of the interrogation room, and looking around to find his way back to Spock. The two other males followed, agreeably, being dragged along like captive moons, in each of their cobbled-together versions of reality, by some faint degree of loyalty, until they each found something that seemed truer to their souls. For all command was this: a temporary accession to a shared inconvenience, and an accommodation of each new, set of collected catastrophes.

K'Toinne and Hof each seemed strangely ennobled, or at least more content with their own stages of confinement, or else there was something simply relieving about being under Kirk's own, affable command. It was freeing, in a way, to be under a gentle authority. The muse could finally dare to look itself in the face.

"Excuse me, sir," Kirk asked another prison guard, who seemed not at all surprised to see the odd trio out and wandering around the halls, "could you direct me back to the Vulcan in his cell?"

Wordlessly, the guard pointed a finger down a long cell block, and the next guard pointed a finger down another one, and likewise, and each guard seeming barely able to stand the sight of them, till Mr. Spock looked up in a total lack of surprise that they had found him at all. For, how else should it be, with Captain James T. Kirk?

"How is the girl," Spock asked, as if coming back with a Tellarite and a Klingon was not a set-up for some new joke or other.

"'The girl' is tired, but will be young again," Kirk said, looking away, for he had already made his foolish promise. And Spock could only nod in common cause.

And then, seeing Spock's serious gaze return to the tricorder, his expression etched with concern, Kirk realized the inevitable truth: that the 'disease vector' of the keepers must have spread like a spider's web, throughout the whole fleet, and that some unbearable force of starships would soon be hurtling toward some dark mad hour, singly or together. He was very glad, in a way, to be on board a forgotten prison ship, out in the middle of nowhere, though he knew it couldn't last, and that he might well have to be the one to put everything right again.

Hof stood staring, in the doorway to the cell: one hairy arm propping him up as he stared down the detainment corridor, as if it stretched on forever, as if his own freedom might indeed have been some distant, ridiculous illusion, like all others. K'Toinne, likewise, kept looking this way and that around the cell, from one corner to another, as if some Klingon cockroach was crawling back and forth across the floor, or as if he fully expected these Starfleet commanders to throw him to the wolves at the earliest opportunity, just as his own brothers would.

They were all lost in their thoughts, the four of them in the unguarded cell, prisoners of their own despairing conviction. What a perfect hiding place a prison cell must be, Kirk realized, for all the defeated who lived on, hidden away from every misspent ambition of freer men, who could not hurt the hopeless here.

"Your ship is back," a prison officer, small and kind said, totally out of place in his gentleness, in this rough and brooding ship, as he poked his head in their cell.

"Let's go, friends," he sighed, following the little bird-like man in the same kind of unassuming green jump-suit as Warden M'rook.

Ten minutes later Spock was rolling Vina down the halls on a gurney, and the others followed in a cluster, as if they were already in some invisible lifeboat, looking grave or sad or even afraid, with this dire woman on their imaginary prow, weaving their way back to the airlock. At least Krishtakonka's cabin would be free and, Kirk supposed, it would go to K'Toinne: who was doomed (like her) to be so different.

And there was the warden, standing at the airlock: unwilling to sidestep ceremony, for when would such a moment come again? There was simply a warm handshake, a smile that surprisingly opened souls. And then that odd, awkward, "looking-away moment" that men endured, rather than face the abyss of another man's heart too long. The four males half-crawled through the passageway to the scout ship, Kirk and Spock gently carrying the woman on a blanket stretched between them.

And how soon would they meet the _Enterprise_? The question had never filled Kirk with dread before.

Spock carried the roll of prison blankets, and Vina's seemingly weightless body inside, back to the hammock in her cabin. Another man in a green jump suit handed Kirk the fur coat, almost as an afterthought: that barbaric cloak of the great and vengeful Vina. A few minutes later, Kirk fired up the engines, and disengaged from the prison ship, and the little black ship leaned away. K'Toinne watched it all from the rear of the cockpit, in quiet disbelief. They were surrounded by its familiar set of noises and telemetric hums and beeps, and Hof once again leaned over Kirk's shoulder, the same way Kirk would leaned over Sulu's, so many times in battle.

But, as he remembered those moments on his own bridge, it filled the captain with a cold fury that a Talosian must be pulling the strings on his own great officers and commanders, through some great burden, through some great, arbitrary moral conviction or other. And yet he held the slimmest hope of getting on board the his shiponce more, and possibly not even getting killed before the keeper worked its will. He laid in a course to intercept the fast-approaching starship.

He had the strange sensation that, if he were dead, none of this would matter at all anymore. And somehow, that made him more confident that the keeper was reaching out from the _Enterprise_, trying to stop him, through fatalism and depression. He smiled at the tug of war they were playing, over an open grave.

"Ah!" Hof declared, for he had quietly been observing the hairless human, even as the warp engines roared to life. "Do not smile, Kirk—we have a saying, we non-humans: when earthmen smile, it means _goodbye_!"

But he said it with a kind of humorous, dramatic finality, as if ruthless humans only used aliens in the furtherance of their own greedy wills, and not only that—used them even to death: as if non-humans were easily discarded, to suit our greedy purposes. As if it were not simply the way of all space-going races. Still, knowing his own human history, Jim Kirk marveled that any other races trusted him at all. He nodded, and his smile gradually faded, as the engines roared to full throttle overhead, and the prison transport seemed to flash away behind them.

The stars, too, slipped away like a magic trick: as if thousands of tiny, far distant tablecloths, outside the portals, had been whipped into streaks all at once, without disrupting any of the actual tiny, distant people who might depend on them. He sat back and called up that deeply annoying holographic starmap again, with a slightly different arrangement of plunging gravity wells, and the two ships: one great and one small.

He could also tell (or thought he could tell) that Mr. Sulu was still navigating on the bridge of the _Enterprise_, from the occasional artful leap in warp-drive maneuvering, which seemed like immensely artful brush-strokes, like calligraphy on rice paper, and which said so much in their simplicity. But he also thought he might see fatigue creeping in, and that meant Sulu might soon fall into familiar patterns, which the captain knew as well as the navigator himself.

"How is our patient," Kirk said, as Spock stood next to the Tellarite.

"Surprisingly well. There seems to be no reason why she shouldn't live another fifty years, under proper care, if her own personal battles don't kill her first."

"That's… a pretty big 'if, Mr. Spock."

"Indeed," the science officer agreed, taking up the co-pilot's seat.

"Fifty years," Kirk shook his head. "Why bother," he said, very quietly.

"With proper reconstructive surgery, and perhaps the blood of keepers, in steady supply," Spock said, tilting his head as if reviewing a complex calculation. She could organize a whole army against the keepers and, perhaps, even find another love to help see her through her final years."

"Revenge doesn't look past tomorrow, Spock."

At that, both men turned their eyes to the little blip on the holographic map, representing their starship, chasing madly to meet them. If the _Enterprise _wasn't looking past tomorrow either, what hope was there?

Scotty slapped the stylus down on a yeoman's wedge-pad, in a moment of weary frustration. And the sudden clattering noise of it, after his signature, woke up a slumbering part of his own brain after three days on duty. He knew that everyone on the bridge was exhausted, like him, but no one wanted to give up the chase. He shook his head and gave an apologetic look, and the yeoman simply nodded and stepped back up to the turbolift, where she disappeared behind the airlock-fast red doors. Little things like that probably meant a visit, in the near future, from Dr. McCoy—as word of tensions, antagonisms, and fatigue sped through the network of ship's yeomen, seemingly even faster than the _Enterprise_ itself was now going.

The registry on that enemy ship wasn't available, which meant a sneak attack, or some alien beyond their previous experience. He wanted to blast it out of the sky but, the longer he thought about it, the more he felt legally responsible for nabbing the murderers that Starfleet had spoken of, in an "eyes-only" communiqué.

He spun slowly around in the command chair, noting the exasperated looks on the faces of the bridge crew, whose weary, squinting eyes flickered up to the helm, now and then, to see if they were closing any more of the gap to their target.

Lieutenant Uhura was doing intelligence work, listening for any sign of communication between their quarry and some outpost or authority ahead of it. Lt. Terry was fretting over the engines, Sulu seemed to be clinging to the helm, almost like a flotation device in a stormy sea, while the usually boyish Chekov was trudging back and forth between the helm and science stations, looking older and older, in posture and gait, at least. Meanwhile, the stars raced by on the main viewer, and the pulse of the red alert lights had become distinctly unpleasant to his optic nerve.

They'd scanned the prison ship, but its own security system, to prevent the 23rd century equivalent of a jail-break, was unavailing. And the message they got from the transport made everything seem normal on board, as they made their way from one penal colony to the next. It was the least likely place to find interstellar assassins, and there was no evidence, as far as they could tell, their target ship had actually ever paused there.

"Lieutenant Uhura," he said, half-turning back to his right, "is there no word at all from Starfleet?"

She shook her head, as it seemed he'd asked her that question just five minutes ago. They should have been able to get some kind of back-up from other ships in the quadrant, but no one seemed available…

But, of course, they never really contacted the prison transport, as any word of Klingon involvement would only have worked against the keeper on the _Enterprise_, raising the ire of the humans, awakening them from their shared dream. They _thought _they'd gone through every reasonable investigative process, out of loyalty and grief. And that too was an illusion, like their call for help.

"They've turned around, sir, to an intercept course," Sulu said, his dark eyes re-focusing with sudden clarity. And everyone on deck seemed to straighten at the same time: finally, at least, they would have their justice.

"Good, we'll ha' no more of this chasin' about," Scotty nodded, though wondering at the turn of events, and at what might have emboldened them at last. They almost had the little ship back on that uncharted ocean world. And, most galling of all, the ship roared up into the sky again, blasting into warp drive with stunning alacrity.

"Let them catch us," Kirk said, at last, as he and Spock looked through the holo-map, out into the streaks of stars, now that they'd turned to meet the _Enterprise_.

"Ship's records show they've already fired on this vessel at least forty-seven times."

"In their illusion," Kirk said, leaning back and trying not to rub his temples in dismay, "we're something evil, something to be… destroyed."

"So it would seem."

"Then are we to assume," Kirk continued, "they have some sort of illusion of a 'Captain Kirk,' giving the orders?"

"No reasonable crewman would knowingly follow such strange and erratic commands as the _Enterprise _has evidently been given."

"Then it's some kind of… revenge. You and I are missing. What if it's revenge for our sake?"

"Logical, though Starfleet would certainly not assign the _Enterprise _to exact such vengeance. Regulations demand, in fact, that an investigative mission be dispatched, seeking to arrest any malefactors."

"And… we're the malefactors," Kirk noted, without amusement. "If Scotty… is really so caught-up in just getting even, for something he _thinks _happened to you and me," Kirk said, shifting uneasily in the pilot's chair. "We could break the illusion, just by showing up…"

"Interference from the keeper presumably on board would pose a severe problem."

"Unless we could take the Klingon on board with us: to break the spell. No keeper could penetrate their mental structure, their inherently violent barriers; and I'm not sure any keeper could stop Scotty from trying to kill one, the minute he saw him on the bridge."

Spock tilted his head, as if hearing a new sound in the underbrush, with those incredible ears. Both men, in their minds, had called up schematic designs of the _Enterprise_, tilting and revolving them this way and that, looking for a way inside. And both men knew there was something so deeply rooted in the minds of interstellar humans, concerning Klingons, that a keeper might not be able to override.

"When I took your brainwave patterns, on the prison transport," Spock said, adopting a medically confidential tone of voice, "there was a distinct change when you laid eyes on Mr. K'Toinne. An almost primal reaction," he added, without any particular moral judgment, but an undisguised degree of fascination.

"You know, I think we've both been working at the same idea, from different ends," Kirk smiled. Spock only shrugged, as it might be inevitable, after serving together so long

"You give me too much credit," Spock demurred. I was merely studying brainwaves, and your own response to a proven stimulus."

"Well, normally I'd hate to be so predictable," Kirk shrugged.

"Just a moment," a voice said, behind them in the cockpit. It was K'Toinne, with his British (or Lunar) learned English.

"Oh, yes, we were just talking about you," Kirk said, rising like a gracious host, and trying not to kick any of the controls as he slipped up to stand with the Klingon, and the Tellarite between them backed up awkwardly.

"Yes, well, if you're talking about just throwing me out there, onto some hostile human starship, as some kind of distraction, or some kind of bait, I might just have something to say about all that."

"But you'd certainly gain your freedom, in the end."

"But that's not the point, if everyone on board has a phaser—and some irrational hatred of people with pointy teeth and… rather dramatic foreheads!" He tilted his Klingon head up into the cockpit lighting, in a gesture that was at once vain and comical.

"Not… _everyone_," Kirk said, unconvincingly.

"Are you mad? Even _I_ have an irrational hatred of Klingons! And I'm one of them!" K'Toinne was practically shaking with fear or rage, though it was impossible to tell which, as his arms waved around while he spoke, and his eyes went wild.

"This is going to be difficult, then," Kirk said, folding his arms more soberly, or perhaps more defensively, as he looked out at the stars. "Because we're going to need several more, like you."

"Like me? Like _me_? I'm only here because there _aren't _any like me!"

"What is this?" General Hof asked, seeming to have missed about half the conversation, somehow, amidst all the beeping and booping of computers.

"We are essentially positing," Mr. Spock said, dispassionately, "what would appear to be a Klingon takeover of the _Enterprise_. At least, temporarily."

"Oh, I'd like to see _that_," Hof said with a snort, shaking his head in dismissal as he walked back down the gangway to his cabin, for a nice sway in his hammock.

"Receiving a message from Starfleet," Spock said. But, before he spoke, in the lull, Kirk thought he heard a faint chuckle from Hof's cabin.

"Bring it up," Kirk said, squeezing past K'Toinne, to take his seat again.

_"…the Biruni, and Ticonderoga. None of them are answering our hail, and each has armed its defenses. A state of emergency in the Rigel system has been declared, but we are at a loss as to their motives or the supposed parameters of any danger they may be defending against. No word, still, from the _Enterprise_."_

"They don't waste any time," Kirk sighed, speaking of the keepers.

"Indeed," the first officer nodded. And, below the star-scape, on the holographic map, they raced to meet the _Enterprise_.

"So what you're saying," K'Toinne squinted, looking up at the blinking control lights over the forward portals, "is if I lay down my life for you, your billions of people on Rigel, and whatever, won't be blasted to hot gasses by your own phasers; if I'm just willing to throw myself down in front of them first?"

Kirk winced, confronted by the imbalances of the proposition. He opened his mouth, to speak, but the Klingon was already on a roll. Suddenly, his mood became strangely, deliciously, happy.

"I don't need a lot, really," K'Toinne said, spreading his arms in the confined space behind them. "Maybe just a nice little ship… you know… even if it has a bit of a fishy-smell."

There was a pause.

"I think that might be arranged," Kirk said, sounding a little tentative, even as he wondered if K'Toinne would still be willing to be thrust into the presence of a hostile _Enterprise _crew, if he knew they were already in the thrall of an even more hostile telepath. The two sounded like they were on the verge of haggling over the sale of an old horse but, in reality, a ship like this could easily take over any small planet K'Toinne wished. Or allow him to ply the space-lanes indefinitely. In modern terms, it was the ultimate freedom, especially considering his recent confinement, and his life-long alienation among his own kind.

"I believe, in your culture, Earthman," K'Toinne said, thrusting out his left hand impetuously, "it is customary to clasp hands on any sort of binding arrangement."

Kirk took his hand, and shook, but it was K'Toinne who was smiling this time. Afterward, his hand sort of hung there in a quandary, for a moment, till he hitched his fore-finger on his belt, like a young pirate.

"This is our enemy," Kirk began, typing into the computer, with one hand. A screen in front of him showed a trio of Talosians, from Pike's leaving moments, in his first visit.

"Yes, I can see how fearsome," K'Toinne sighed, with obvious exasperation at the human's apparent theatricality. To him, it was just a tiny little skeleton in a robe, with a head like a great Romulan artichoke.

"This is what they did on our colony on Saldana II," Kirk said, going on, ignoring the Klingon.

There followed (on the control panel) a visual of the tricorder evidence of the mob attacking Mrs. Vedder, when she finally went ambling dementedly down the road, between storms; and then some grotesque aftermath from the subterranean water treatment facility, and the terrible sight of body parts scattered around the shattered recycling vats; and finally the view looking down, from high up in the burning grain elevator, apparently from Spock's armored suit and helmet, before he, and it went tumbling down in the dark.

"All from their power to reach into our minds," Kirk said, quietly.

"You know," K'Toinne said, shaking his head, "where I come from, we say you people come with the madness already built in. We Klingons actually have to go looking for it—and seek it out. We confront the madness, and we vanquish it, one way or another. You, you people, twist it around you like a blanket, which you fight over in bed, with whomever, or whatever: for the night, or forever. We don't make a lover of our madness. But you do!"

Personally, Jim Kirk preferred stories where the human spirit always triumphed, in the end. But, clearly, he was in the minority in this ship.

"We have confirmed navigational contact with the _Enterprise_," Spock said, seizing the moment while Kirk digested K'Toinne's words.

"Ah, your nagivational beams have intersected," K'Toinne said cautiously, all the fight going out of him suddenly, as if it had just now occurred to him that this (possibly fatal) plan might really, truly go into effect at any moment. He stepped back from the control panels, and the Starfleet officers.

He might have fled back to his cabin, but instead he backed into the Tellarite, who'd returned, looking irritated, from down the gangway, bearing a food tray.

"Your food synthesizer, it is broken. These 'spare-ribs' as you call them: they are cold."

The other three beings in the cockpit stopped for a moment, trying to disregard the big furry male with the pile of synthetic, Kansas City-style pork ribs, slathered in barbecue sauce. The general looked at the controls beneath the wide, narrow cockpit portals.

"Your ships will brush right past each other, at this speed," Hof said. "Assuming they don't blast us out of the sky first, of course."

"Possibly, we can up the ante," Kirk said, manually correcting the safety features of the navigation computer, to steer it back into a collision at a combined warp factor of roughly warp twenty five.

"We should be there in no time flat," the captain nodded, as the touch-pads turned bright red in warning, from the usual peaceful glittering of green and yellow at his fingertips. Once again, though, the safeguards kicked in, and he had to "correct" the computer's programming, which would have steered them clear of the starship.

"Can you help Mr. K'Toinne back to the transporter booth, Mr. Spock?"

"If there's enough time," the Vulcan said, twisting out of his co-pilot's seat, even as Kirk tried again to guarantee the collision. The Vulcan stood next to the Klingon, waiting expectantly.

"But won't your warp engines establish a point of infinite gravity within the _Enterprise_?" K'Toinne began clamping his hands down on the top of Kirk's padded seat, as if that would save him, in any way.

"And, if I know our navigator, on the _Enterprise_," Kirk nodded, "once he gives up trying to avoid it, he'll do exactly the same thing to us."

"Shields fully intact," Spock said, looking back, over Kirk's shoulder.

Each one of them watched the impossible, blind blackness out ahead, knowing the _Enterprise _would come streaking out of nowhere, upon them so quickly, they'd never know it without instrumentation. And Kirk kept glancing down at the sensors, as if he expected starship phasers to come blasting down on them too, to bat their atoms aside.

"At this speed," Hof said, shivering, and shaking his head, "we'll just go flying right past them—no being can truly intercept another ship at this speed." The warning sirens started up inside the little cockpit, crowded with bipeds.

"Impact in less than one minute," Spock said, finally scooping K'Toinne up by his arm and hurrying him back to the transporter.

There was an ominous crack in the hull, just a sound really, as the inertial dampeners went into an emergency mode, as if the ship had now confirmed some kind of real-space cataclysm just ahead.

The Klingon stepped backward, tugged-along by the Vulcan, and they squeezed around Hof. It wasn't entirely clear from his expression if K'Toinne was actually going to go through with the deal or not.

"Kirk to _Enterprise_, Kirk to _Enterprise_," the captain said, in the pilot's seat, hoping to draw some kind of attention as the two ships were about to collide.

"I shall be in my quarters," Hof said, as if making some minor, deliberative decision, but trying to get ahead of K'Toinne and Spock as quickly as possible, his head ducked down, as if he were eager to escape the coming disaster in the safety of his cabin. But like an explosive charge behind a cannonball, he only pushed the young Klingon and the Vulcan faster down the gangway, toward the glassy pads of the transporter, under his hairy mass. Miraculously, not one drop of barbecue sauce spilled from his tray as he careened into his little room.

"But I—" and just that quickly, K'Toinne was stumbling up onto the pads, and dissolving, as he cowered against the clear splatter-wall, and the ship went racing into the maw of the _Enterprise_. In that moment of frothy, golden de-materialization, from a state of pure animal instinct, overcome by fear or rage, he finally appeared truly Klingon, before he was quite simply gone. Mr. Spock double-checked the transporter instruments, and hurried back up to the cockpit.

"Let's try and go right between her neck and the port engines," the captain nodded, as if it were a perfectly reasonable way to get a truck out of a ditch. It would have been more like shooting a subatomic apple off a boy's head, with a medieval battering ram. But here they were.

"They have stopped correcting," Spock nodded.

"Thank you, Mr. Sulu," Kirk said very quietly. He suddenly imagined a lot of sweaty commanders crowded around the helm, on his ship up ahead.

"Energizing," Kirk said, as the holo-map showed no more stalactites between them, anymore—except the two ships and a new, jagged gravity well like a sideways waterfall, opening up in the gap between them, like an ice-bridge growing thicker by the second. And even the map was flashing red, now. A flicker of lights indicated K'Toinne's atoms were being shot through space, straight out in front of them.

Later, Kirk would have to admit he couldn't even hear the loud clanging of the collision warning, squawking like a gander all around them, as they broke through the great ship's shielding with a crash, and the neck and port nacelle went flashing by on either side of the portals.

They were out behind the _Enterprise _just that fast, and spinning around for the return. But the starship had come to a sudden stop.

"Something happened," Kirk said, wondering if he'd go aboard soon, to find the smell of vaporized Klingon up on the bridge in a minute or two.

"The plan appears to have worked, well enough," Spock said, breathing again, at last. He flicked a button on the controls, and Scotty's voice came through, like he was in the next room, sounding utterly amazed.

"Captain, is that really you?"

"Yes, Mr. Scott, it most certainly is."

"He says he's with you!" Scotty scarcely bothered to contain his contempt, tossing his chin toward K'Toinne, as Kirk and Spock emerged on to the bridge, at long last, from the transporter with Spock. A Klingon on the bridge was clearly the last straw for the frequently-tested Scotsman.

"And this?" Kirk stopped, on his way down to the center-seat, to watch as medics flipped a blanket over the giant head of a tiny, motionless alien on the deck.

"I don't know! He just appeared out of nowhere, plain as day, as we went racing toward you—we were all so wrapped up in the moment, we had no idea, till Uhura here laid eyes on him, and brought him down like a champion!" Scotty turned to the beautiful communications officer, who was sitting with her hands clasped at her station, as if waiting for the beginning of some long deposition process, for assaulting a weaker alien. Still, she could hardly keep from smiling at the way things turned out.

"Dead?"

"I'm not sure, Captain," Uhura said.

"Get it to sickbay. Keep it alive, but unconscious." Two security guards stepped forward, and picked up the little creature, like a hammock between them. They disappeared into the turbolift, as the red doors shut behind them.

"Permission to cancel protocol eight, Captain?" Spock asked, having marched around to the science station again.

"Yes, Mr. Spock, let's put an end to false mourning. Mr. Chekov, bring that scout ship in to the hanger deck, get some medics down there, we have a patient for Dr. McCoy. And set a course to the Rigel colonies, best possible speed. Mr. Sulu, lay it in when ready."

"Aye, sir," the Russian nodded.

"Aye, Captain," Sulu repeated, smiling at last, in relief.

Once they got under way, to intercept those three sister ships, Kirk headed down to the shuttle bay. A team of four medics came rushing across the bay with a stretcher carrying Vina, before Kirk even got past the airlock.

The black scout ship sat incongruously, six times larger than any of the tied-down shuttles, hissing and powering down, as it ran through some kind of standby programming, with the hatch opened on the side. A moment later, General Hof stuck his head down through the opening, toward the captain.

"Permission to come aboard?" he said, loud and hale and hearty, though very much upside down.

"Yes, General, welcome to the _Enterprise_."

Hof actually disappeared back inside for a moment, then tentatively climbed down the staircase, as Kirk took his hand.

"You know, I don't mean to be too personal," Kirk said, as they walked from the bristling black ship, "but do you require any sort of general's uniform?"

"No, no, perhaps just a jumpsuit, for modesty's sake. Don't want to arouse any of your crew, you know. But something with big transparent panels in it, so people know I'm a mature male, and worthy of respect."

"Perfectly understandable," Kirk nodded. A few minutes later, the two stood at the supply shop, where an ensign was summoned to escort Hof to guest quarters, or sickbay, as he wished.

"No, no, I go with you!" the Tellarite insisted, as a pair of requisition officers zipped him into a newly-fabricated jumpsuit, essentially a great transparent wrapper of amber and green and blue and red squares, with glittering belts running horizontally and vertically, like metallic Christmas ribbons.

"Fair enough," Kirk nodded, and they set out for Sickbay. It would be the first time Hof had met a keeper in the flesh, since his escape.


	9. Chapters 16 and 17

**Chapter Sixteen **

"Well, Jim," McCoy shook his head, "everything works. But I've never seen a Talosian before!"

The keeper lay, tiny and frail, on the heavy exam bed in sickbay: under a scanner board that was strangely frozen. It was all lit up, as though it was working just fine, but none of the arrows across the bottom would rise to indicate anything, and neither of the big center lights would blink with heartbeats or pulse. And even if they could program in the relevant monitoring functions, it might be too late to make any difference. It wasn't that strong to begin with, and Uhura had apparently brought it down with great determination.

"So," General Hof grunted, nodding in satisfaction, "there's no way to tell if it might be in pain, or not?" His clenched paws pounded excitedly against his upper hindquarters.

"That, sir, is considered an inappropriate question on board this ship," McCoy replied tartly.

"The general spent many years in confinement, thanks to these… people," Kirk said, diplomatically.

The ship's surgeon grumbled, busying himself with a whirring little hand-scanner over one section of the keeper's abdomen, then another, and checking to see if the scanner board would ever come to life. Finally, McCoy spoke up again, though almost only to himself: "Besides, in a state of unconsciousness, it is considered somewhat unlikely he would feel much of anything, barring any spike in blood pressure or brainwaves."

"Could it be blocking your readings, even in an unconscious state?" Kirk was beginning to regret the order to revive it at all.

"Well, I doubt it, after what everybody's been saying about him, just suddenly appearing on the bridge, during a moment of extreme crisis. We probably wouldn't be seeing him now, if he had that power of illusion, unconscious like this."

"Bones," Kirk said, drawing closer to the doctor, "I promised Vina…" He stopped, awkwardly.

"Yes, Jim?" It seemed an odd time for the captain to be bringing up his other patient, but what was one more distraction, at this point? McCoy's large, arctic blue eyes focused on Kirk now with a practiced patience, but also (perhaps) a vague air of suspicion.

"Well, after all she's been through," Kirk sighed, embarrassed, "I promised we'd… inject… a small amount of this being's blood into her own… bloodstream…" It sounded ghastly and grotesque, now that he had to say it to an actual doctor's face.

McCoy looked as though he wanted to say something very sharp and to the point, and then his head jerked back slightly, as if he were a wily old swamp turtle, taking a second look before grabbing something underwater.

"Jim, does that really sound medically, ethically, right to you?"

"When they did it to her, back on Talos IV," Kirk said, as if appealing to the entire Federation High Council all at once, "it gave her the power to repair their ancient machines, with Captain Pike's guidance—and it gave her an illusion of beauty. And, she saved our lives on Saldana II."

"And now, to return the favor," McCoy said, following but still skeptical, "we'll just remove a little vital fluid from this creature, and pump it into her, even as it lies there, clinging to life by a thread? And then, a little more, and a little more after that, whenever she feels… not so pretty."

"It worked before, to our benefit."

"What is this, a circus, a magic act?" McCoy's fingers had wrapped around the hand-held scanner in such professional outrage that the muscles in his forearm, below his blue satin short-sleeve, strained like metal bands under his skin.

"She ate the same food as they did, for decades," Kirk insisted, "and breathed the same air—maybe it acclimated her to accept some other elements of their world, through their own blood," he added, in that familiar and, usually, undeniable way, not unlike the power-mad Platonians they'd encountered in the last year or so. Across the aisle, Vina lay motionless on her own bed in the wardroom.

"Look!" It was Hof, his great paw pointing up at the screen above the bed.

The board had come to life, if only slightly, registering a light pulse, but no heartbeat. But if the other indicators, the little arrows measuring different life-functions, had wavered upward at all from the level of death, it might have only been their imagination.

"Well, that rules out the theory of a beating heart," McCoy said, tilting his head, and sounding slightly amazed. "Maybe their whole circulatory system operates as a kind of heart."

"That would also help explain those pumping veins," Kirk nodded, referring to the powerful action of the vessels that fed their brains. Even now, they were beginning to pound, under parchment-like flesh.

"Yes, I suppose—"

_"Captain Kirk," _a high, acerbic voice said now, though the keeper's mouth, and eyes, remained closed.

"Did you hear that?"

McCoy nodded, and the others looked confused, like primitive hunter-gatherers, surrounding some 19th Century British explorer.

_"Everything is a flame," _the voice said, contemplatively, though it was also possible it had said, _everything is a-flame, _which would more to the point, considering the grain tower and the fiery attack on the ocean world, and soon on the Rigel system, all gathering into some galactic inferno.

Just then, Mr. Spock appeared in the wardroom doorway, with the young Klingon following reluctantly behind. It was as if the science officer had heard the keeper's voice himself, all the way up on the bridge. Hurriedly, he leaned to K'Toinne's ear, and whispered something that made the Klingon go from a swarthy brownish-gold color, to something nearly yellow, in the tips of his ears, and the middle of his face, as if all the purple blood had drained out of his head in an instant. The two aliens quietly crossed to the foot of the keeper's bed.

_"And a flame must either spread, or die. In your culture," _the calm, high-pitched voice went on, _"you say that everything is energy, in either an active, or a potential state. But this is merely an illusion. Everything is a flame, pure and direct and consistent in shape and ideology as fire when it first begins. And gradually, as with every flame, it begins to waver, to seek new sources of combustion, as the energy rises and braids and broadens, absorbing the new sources of fuel."_

Kirk nodded, without speaking.

_"So it is, with us. Our own culture lost material for sustaining its own fire, until we reached out and gathered new vision, new energy, to keep our hope and passion alive. But the isolation imposed by your people removed those outside sources, and we were required to take drastic action. We led your own people to trigger the radiation accident that permanently impaired Captain Pike. And soon, we were able to induce the Vulcanoid here to bring him back to us. _

_" In this way, we regained our old powers, and our freedom. All is as it must be. A flame will be small and true, as long as it is lifted high, and has a continuous source of fuel. But a flame that is left to die will be forced to seek out new fuel, if it can, with widespread consequences. And now you see, when we were forced to abandon our plan to develop a new culture above ground, our confrontation with extinction led us to this great moment, now, on the threshold of victory."_

"We couldn't just let you reach out and grab innocent space travelers, like flies wandering into a trap," the captain said, very flatly.

_"It would have been impossible, at any rate, to sustain the life of Captain Pike, whom you delivered to us on the brink of death. It became inevitable that we should use his powers of mechanical repair for our own survival, and escape. And, thanks to his love for the Earth-woman, our destiny is reborn."_

A faint smile seemed to struggle along the edges of the keeper's mouth, and slowly his eyes opened, and his temple arteries throbbed more visibly. If this were allowed to continue, Kirk realized, all men would be hemmed in, winnowed out, and worn down, once these invisible conquerors swept down on them from the Federation's own mighty ships.

"Bones, I need that blood," Kirk demanded, but quietly: as if the keeper didn't already know what was on his mind.

The doctor sighed through gritted teeth, and found a hypo on a tray between the beds, on a little shelf on the bulkhead. Reluctantly, he pressed it into the keeper's shoulder, and a strange orange liquid burbled up into the cap at the top.

Across the room, Vina lay looking old and strangely frightened, as she gazed up at the ceiling. She'd had a few days of amateur medical attention from Spock, and then more practiced care on the out-of-date prison ship, but still looked a wreck. McCoy led Kirk over to her side, after looking into the hypo cartridge, and shook his head. Finally, he pressed the vapor-injector end into her arm. The hiss was plain and pneumatic, without any sound of relief that might have corresponded to the relaxation that came over her ancient, wounded face in an instant.

Then without warning, the keeper leaped up into the air, flying across the room at Vina, its arms spread out like an angel of vengeance. Vina, too, flew up from beneath her blanket to collide with him: just as fast, a meter and a half above the deck. Their bodies smashed together, arms and legs like clubs and fire, as the blankets fell away. The men all stood back in stunned silence to watch the floating, vicious attacks, like boxers darting around the wardroom, in zero-gravity.

First Vina went spinning back against a wall behind her, and skittered up and across the ceiling, as the keeper floated this way and that, its eyes dancing like orbs swaying on a Christmas tree.

Unable to restrain himself, Kirk picked up a metal pushcart and hurled it into the air, though he wasn't sure at what.

The Vulcan whispered something into the Klingon's ear, and then, K'Toinne raised his fist, and busted Mr. Spock solidly in the face.

Kirk and McCoy were so shocked at K'Toinne's violent action that the vision of the two raging telepaths instantly faded to almost nothing before them. Vina and the keeper were back in their beds, motionless once more. Only a faint, dark halo along Kirk's optic nerve suggested a tangle of black soot in the air, where Vina and the keeper had been fighting, and part of that halo twisted upward like a whisp of a butterfly, while the rest untangled, falling to the deck like a bullwhip, before disintegrating entirely. Such were the dreams that enslaved men.

Spock shook his head slightly, recovering from the Klingon's punch, and straightened his blue science tunic without any sign of offense. Then, to everyone's amazement, he even nodded appreciatively to K'Toinne, for breaking the Earthmen's concentration.

But chaos erupted anew, a moment later, as General Hof seized the opportunity to inflict some violence of his own. He leapt over to the Talosian's bed and began strangling the keeper by the neck where it lay. Kirk and McCoy were on him quickly, prying his hairy paws from the gasping, nearly motionless being.

"Allow me to create a teachable moment!" General Hof exclaimed, both paws struggling in the air, as Kirk dragged him back against the next bed, and both beings tumbling onto the cushion, creating a mixed reading on the scanner board overhead. The keeper's board was still almost entirely dark, though that little pulse was still there, even as he gasped for breath, and McCoy measured out a new hypo, for a tranquilizer. It _hissed _into the keeper's neck.

Somehow, in the sudden peacefulness that followed both outbursts, and the Klingon punching the peaceful Vulcan, it was time for each male to turn and examine the lone woman across the room: the ruined Earth scientist. She slowly propped herself up on her bed with her elbows, looking more alert and alive than she had in days.

"Jim," McCoy said, quietly, "is it really your intention to keep this being alive, simply to preserve the vanity of another being? And can you honestly tell me it's _not _because she's just one of our kind?"

Kirk and Hof leaned forward on the side of the bed, and the general gradually readjusted himself, fastidiously, in his new transparent uniform. Everything seemed to be returning to normal, in spite of the absolute grab-bag of interplanetary species, and their passions, which had all erupted just a moment ago. If this sort of thing was any indication, it did not bode well for the rest of the Federation.

"She's been fighting them since the moment Chris Pike let them loose," Kirk said, also straightening his uniform. "I owe her something for all her trouble, don't I?"

"Do you, Jim?" McCoy had, at once, boiled it down to a very simple equation. And, with the keeper apparently fully sedated, the captain couldn't blame anyone but himself for the doubt he felt.

"Bones, if you'd seen what they've done so far, to innocent worlds, to innocent people…"

"Of course," the doctor nodded, emphatically. "Then I'd probably feel totally different about it. But that's not my job. It's not my part to say you can squeeze one living creature, just to make another feel young and attractive."

"Bones, we need her."

"She's probably at her healthiest she's been in decades now, considering her apparent age," McCoy whispered, and the others in sickbay crowded around for a listen. "What more are you going to gain, if she doesn't show the scars, or the character, of a woman of, say, ninety-five, in modern reckoning? She's still got a much better chance of survival now, and that's worth more than looks any day of the week! Do you really have to drain another being dry, because of how much evil its brethren might be doing?"

The captain walked over to Vina's bed, where she looked as though she'd just had a bad coughing fit, and was sitting up against a bolster. The other males had the good sense to hang back, where (perhaps) they could restrain the frightening Talosian, if possible.

As he sat on the edge of her bed, and began speaking to her, and as she watched his eyes move around her face and hair and shoulders, she gradually corrected each area, telepathically: as if seeing herself in a mirror, through his own eyes, and applying some fantastic make-up.

"How do you feel?"

"Not bad," she said, shifting lower in bed, so he towered over her, even as the others watched. "Wait till next time, as they say."

"As they say," he smiled, his eyes tracing down that tragic purple scar, down the middle of her face. And, just as quickly, it began to disappear, decades after her crash landing on Talos IV. Her nose rearranged itself straight again, and her skin-tone evened out, then the wrinkles, too. Along with the sudden radiation of youth, her hair went from matted and gray to silky and blond again.

"How often do you think you'll need another injection like that," he asked.

"Hard to say," she almost pouted, but seemed to think better of it, remembering she was dealing with a Starfleet captain, and not just any idiot off the street.

"We're having a little argument," he continued, "over the ethics of keeping one of them alive, just to keep you 'in the game,' as they say."

"They made me old. Why shouldn't they make me young?" she sighed, leaning back and closing her eyes, in delicious luxury after nearly a week in an unsympathetic hammock.

"Well," he said, quietly, "everybody gets old, eventually."

"But in this case, Captain, 'youth' is just a state of mind," she purred, opening her eyes again. Dazzling blue and suddenly playful, they were.

"Well, I suppose you could get a new injection, every time we get a new keeper. That doesn't seem _too _abusive. It might even be a good incentive!" His own hazel eyes were getting a little misty, as he privately rejoiced in her relentless ability to survive, against all odds.

"Yes, we wouldn't want to make them suffer," she said, looking him straight in the eye, as if he might be the one to suddenly wither and age now, confronted with her sarcasm, and the terrible truth of the matter. He shifted forward slightly, as if to become more intimate with her, to arrive at some deeper understanding, in the discussion. And, he had to admit, a strange, delicious madness seemed to tempt him toward her.

In the background, Vina could see the Klingon looking alarmed, as Jim Kirk clearly seemed to be leaning down for a kiss from the blond Earth woman. The Klingon's eyes went back and forth from Kirk to her, and finally to the Vulcan first officer. And, as he seemed convinced another evil illusion was about to take root, he threw a punch at Spock's face again. But, this time, the Vulcan caught his fist in mid-strike. There was no other illusion so dangerous, for the moment, as this mighty temptation.

"I suppose that's not the most important thing," she smiled, and the spell was broken. He backed away, and got up stiffly, suddenly terribly interested in the scanner board over her beautiful head. She seemed entirely healthy and robust, that much was for certain.

The little speaker-grill on the wall nearby lit up, and the usual boatswain's whistle was heard. He stepped to the doorway and punched the lighted oval on the intercom.

"Kirk here."

"Captain, we're getting a visual from Rigel VII, priority one," Uhura announced, from up on the bridge.

"Pipe it down here, Lieutenant," he said. Across the ward room, Spock reached over the keeper's unconscious head. And, like a dream floating above its own creator, the black scanner-screen switched to show a horrific scene of starships descending steadily on a large city, as a camera looked up at each ship: blackened except for its orange engine-tips, and its view-ports, strangely leering out of each saucer's tilting prow.

Shouting in the streets grew louder as the ships seemed to come in for an impossible landing, till their phasers lashed out like the venom from a Janusian repti-cat. The starships then flashed overhead and were gone, even as the largest buildings dissolved in green, wavering blocks behind them. After a moment of hideous disintegration, where the deep insides of the buildings were equally visible as the outer shells, the scene shifted around to show the same four ships streaking away, back up into space, as more buildings on the surface shimmered like giants' gravestones, into the next world.

It was the one kind of attack the Federation could not have foreseen, which made it all the worse. Faces on the screen were contorted into a kind of anguished self-reproach, for their long-held trust in Starfleet and starships, to save them from the worst imaginable straits. Now, those very ships had turned, and swooped down for a second run: racing across the orange haze of fire and smoke that filled the streets of Rigel VII's largest city: impulse engines shrieking in the air, as if the sky itself were torn to shreds.

And, just like that, they had swept up into the sky again, leaving only the occasional scream of someone desperate to find a Bob or Roy or David, for the very smoke that filled the air seemed to have melted the relay camera to nearly breaking down, distorting the voices that became the present-day haunting.

"I suppose they all think their own captains' are dead, too," McCoy said, very quietly, referring to the starships that raced on now, to the next world. Slowly, the group broke up, with Spock heading up to the bridge.

Jim Kirk tapped lightly on Scotty's cabin door, assuming—or hoping—the chief engineer was fast asleep, after four days in the command chair. But the door whipped open.

"Aye, come in," a muffled voice said, in the shadows inside.

"I hope I'm not too late to the party," the captain said quietly, holding a heavy glass bottle up for Mr. Scott's inspection.

Scotty was hunched in front of a computer monitor, replaying the moment over and over, when the keeper suddenly became visible, right by his side, on the bridge of the _Enterprise_, in the heat of battle. The captain pulled a chair up alongside, and opened the bottle of whiskey. Without consulting the engineer, he filled the glass on the table.

"'Ere," Scotty leaned back, finding another glass on a counter by some books and a framed set of medals. Now both glasses were filled.

Both men stared as the Talosian appeared again, right out of thin air, on the screen. They watched as Uhura leapt out of her chair behind it, and brought down the alien with a diving tackle.

"The ship's recorders should have detected him all along," Kirk sighed, biting his thumbnail.

"Aye," but we couldn'a heard the warning," Scotty shook his head.

"Unless it fooled our own crewmen into blocking, or deleting the evidence."

"Ach, it just gets worse and worse."

"Well, they wouldn't _know _they were doing it," Kirk shrugged.

"Aye, and that's what's gonna be the ruin of Rigel."

"Computer," Kirk said, taking a sip of the alcohol.

"_Working_."

"How could an alien invader take control of the ship without the ship actually coming to a halt, and returning to base, in a self-enforced quarantine?"

"_There are six known ways an invasion protocol may be rescinded. Most common is the so-called helper-chimera, in which the host claims to be unaware of a mutually beneficial relationship._"

"Stop. Didn't anyone from Starfleet try to program safeguards against this particular species, after the _Enterprise_' first visit to Talos IV?"

"_Working._ _Safeguards were installed by Captain Christopher Pike, but later removed._"

"By whom?"

"_Captain Christopher Pike_."

There was an uneasy silence, and neither man drank. They just stared at the image of the keeper on the bridge, next to Scotty, from earlier that night, and the recording running back and forth, so the yeoman in the background walked forward, then backward, and forward then backward, as the keeper appeared and disappeared, to Scotty's undying remorse. Up in the corner, on the left, Uhura's shocked expression became one of fierce determination, over and over, right before she leapt over the red railing like a tigress.

"Relax, Scotty," Jim Kirk said, leaning back in the guest chair now. "Or, just think how much worse the commanders of those other ships will feel, when we clear this all… up…" He shook his head, not sure how that could possibly be the end of the sentence.

"I wonder," Scotty said quietly, tapping his fingers on the table. "Computer."

"_Working_."

"Why'd Captain Pike negate his own protective programming, against them coming back?"

There was a long silence, as the computer searched for some hard and fast explanation related to that strange incident, that "doing" and "undoing," months after Talos IV.

Every single day in a starship's life, thousands of crew notes were entered into the ship's computer, and this was many years ago. Kirk idly imagined some very orderly librarian carefully walking down a long row of old books, in a room full of rows, in a building full of rooms, and full of many more orderly librarians. And all the while, more and more books were flying onto the shelves, filling the rows, and the rooms, and the buildings. Finally, the computer spoke again.

"_Unknown_."

But Jim Kirk had figured it out, already.

"They were his only link to her, back then. Before he came back to Talos, he wanted some kind of connection. And the greater the distance, the greater the risk he was willing to assume, to listen for her, across the light years…" he trailed off, though, at the sheer romanticism of it, and the dreadful consequences.

"Aye," Scotty folded his arms over his red tunic, "but he must've known, as he was dyin' down there, this'd be the ruination of all of us."

"And Starfleet assumed that Talos was locked up tight, to go extinct." Kirk spoke through his fingers, as his chin rested on the heel of his hand.

"Aye, well, things look a wee mite different on the other end of the chalkboard." Scotty allowed himself a humorless little chuckle.

"Computer," Kirk said, growing impatient. He didn't wait for the usual response. "Is there any other reference to Captain Pike and Talos IV after that first mission, and before we returned?"

"_Official messages include 1,538 condolences from former crewmembers, to a Starfleet medical facility, following an injury sustained by Christopher Pike during a training mission. Other notes include star-charts, quarantine strategies, and analyses of falsified emergency calls in the region._"

"Nothing else?"

Again, it seemed, the librarians were combing through the farthest shelves, over every tiny missive.

"_Negative_."

Kirk wanted to sweep his tumbler of whiskey right off the table, so it would smash against the cabin wall, out of pure frustration and disgust.

"Maybe he was just hopin' to rely on human understanding," Scotty said, a little hopelessly, but mostly in pure exhaustion, after four days' and nights' steady work. Clearly, from his own baleful expression, he was hoping for a little understanding himself.

Kirk nodded. The keepers could thrust any new, passionate compulsion into any human mind they chose. But any human mind would almost certainly have to stop and consider the simplest motives of other men or women, before they weighed out judgment. If they could even recognized their victims as humans, first… but then he remembered Mayor Holdenreid, and how easy it was for him to turn a phaser on a starship captain, out of some angry presumption of shapeless grievance.

"Chris Pike tried to stop Spock from taking him back to Talos," Kirk said, leaning forward, "but then the sight of her, and maybe the knowledge of his own impending death, seemed to change his mind_._"

"Aye," Scotty had to admit.

"And Vina's acquired telepathic ability," Kirk said, his eyes moving from one edge of the round table to the other, as if counting out lengths of rope, "gave him the power to set her free."

"When a man can't trust his own motives," Scotty shook his head, "he canna do anythin'."

Kirk gave Scotty a little smile.

"You _can _do anything, Scotty."

The Scotsman started to shake his head in embarrassment, but managed to nod in confirmation.

"Aye, I know it. Well, I'd better turn in, those engines won't keep runnin' like this without some good attention in the morning."

"All right, good work," Kirk said, getting up and going to the door.

"It's a pity we can't know men's hearts, except in their dreams," Scotty said, lumbering across the cabin to his bunk.

"Good night," Kirk said, going to the door, and trying to look alert and alive as he stepped out into the broad, curving corridor.

_Maybe he was relying on human understanding_, Scotty seemed to say again, even as the captain walked around to the turbolift.

"No, no," Kirk shook his head, as Spock automatically got up to surrender the captain's chair on the bridge. For once, Jim Kirk just wanted to lean against the arm of it, from the outside, without having to formulate every word and thought so carefully. Besides, if he sat down now, he might just fall asleep. But, for all Jim Kirk's flagging energy, now that he was "home" again, Spock looked doubly at attention: leaning forward slightly toward the helm.

"We talked about 'contamination,'" Kirk sighed, counting the touchpads on the armrest, till he reached the end and his eyes, too, swept up to the view of the stars, as the ship raced toward the next inhabited world in the Rigel system. And, at the mention again, of "contamination," Spock pushed himself back into the chair, and folded his hands in his lap like a witness on the stand. The orange light from the turbolift entryway behind him reflected against his dark, shiny hair.

"Each mental contact with another being creates a kind of contamination," the Vulcan said, his words being hardly more than a breath.

"And each… mental contact… with an idea," Kirk nodded. "And… just 'being alive,' I suppose…"

"Indeed," Spock said, becoming more withdrawn, even as Kirk tried to appear more relaxed and sympathetic. And, all around them, the green and gold lights of control panels glowed as crewmen worked at their stations. All the regulars, all the lead members of the navigation, or communications, or engineering teams, had all gone off-duty, and the mood was strangely quiet and focused as the evening crew wrapped up its own end-of-duty-shift, under the unexpected watch of their newly returned captain.

"I just can't," Kirk struggled to find the words, "for the life of me, think why Chris Pike would take the risk… to repair those ancient, magical machines. He must have… known… it would put us all in a terrible danger soon after."

If Spock were capable of blushing, perhaps he would have, just then. Instead, he pursed his lips, and then tilted his chin this way and that, as if it were a searchlight, seeking out rocks along a shoreline.

"It may simply be the way of all empires, that they are ultimately subdued by their own weakness from within," Spock said, looking downcast.

"In this case: the weakness of… hatred, the weakness of false grievance, of… false mourning."

"Correct," Spock said, very quietly, as if it were just the creaking of wood, deep inside.

"And now, with K'Toinne," Kirk shrugged, "we're just trying to off-load all that hatred, and grievance, and mourning, off onto another being. To be less vulnerable to the keepers, ourselves."

"Perhaps it was some unavoidable fate," Spock said, though of course he had engineered a significant part of it himself, out of unspoken love. Kirk nodded, politely. "Perhaps it will ultimately drive the Federation, and the Klingons, closer."

"Perhaps." The captain rubbed his forehead, then he went back to the subject of Spock's first starship captain. "Perhaps they simply belonged together, And then, when his time was up, he gave her… the ultimate gift."

Spock said nothing at this, as if such timeless love were some kind of a vast geological formation, the great Martian canyon, or the flaming mountains of Clark III.

"Or," Kirk continued, oblivious to Spock's discomfort, "perhaps Chris Pike just knew that most people go through life in an endless trap of memories and illusions, to serve or destroy them, with or without the help of the keepers."

Spock said nothing, as if listening to some entirely alien line of thought.

"And if Vina were free at last, even if the keepers got out for just a little while," Kirk resumed, "it wouldn't be… all that different from the rest of recorded human history, with men the slaves of their own wild imaginings."

"But men were born to be free," Spock said. "And the keepers would certainly stand in the way of that."

"Assuming men knew they weren't free. Assuming they didn't have some grudge, some grievance, to blame it on."

"Signal from Rigel V, sirs," Lt. Palmer announced. The cool blond had turned toward them, in her chair at communications.

"On screen, Lieutenant," Kirk said, ruefully. Another scene of imaginary vengeance, based on imaginary wrongs, approved by imaginary authority, played out before them, in very real chaos and destruction.

This time, a space satellite above R-5 captured the approaching ships on its sensors, as the _Enterprise _watched, still far away as the same three black starships descended on another loyal outpost moon. The ships sliced downward through swirling clouds, and something brighter and more widespread than green summer lightning leapt out ahead of them, or where they should be now, beneath the clouds. And red fires grew dim in their wake.

He wanted to ask Spock about the safeguards against the keepers, and why Chris Pike would ever have erased them, after being so careful to install them in the first place. Was it his regret over leaving Vina behind? His way of keeping the connection between them, in spite of the unmatchable risk?

Jim Kirk imagined it would eat away at his predecessor, and make him old, and ruined, like the Prometheus rays themselves, ravaging and rebuilding, over and over. And he kicked himself, for not even realizing till now that it was really just an undying love that spawned so much tragedy. But he couldn't go back and reunite them. And, for better or worse, Vina wouldn't stop trying.

It should have been asked, "why." It was (at once) so small a question, and yet so large. The blackened starships, racing ahead of them in some mindless revenge, might never have been stolen away like this, and the _Enterprise _before them, if only Chris Pike hadn't changed his mind.

But he looked at Spock, and saw a lonely man, trying to keep his mask on. And he looked at himself, at Jim Kirk, and saw a man who was too practiced in evading loneliness. They were both, by choice, more illusions than real in that moment.

And now the damage was done all over again: they watched the viewscreen in silence, till the mighty ships emerged from the moon's atmosphere, leaving wide-spread fires beneath the clouds, and then speeding off to Rigel III, the most populous world this side of Earth, with billions of people.

**Chapter Seventeen **

Ensign Robert Stamfield watched from engineering, as the _Ticonderoga _blasted away at the enemy strongholds again. The images were shared across the starship, as they hunted down Captain Safeer's killers. The _Ticonderoga_ was only running on impulse within the system, and there was a lot more time to look away from the control boards, even if something went wrong—compared to the faster pace of work, during warp drive.

But now his relief was just walking through the doors into the cavernous engine room, as the big engines cycled peacefully.

"Heard your pet was feeling sick," Ensign Vickers smiled, nudging Stamfield aside from the controls. He didn't have to nudge very hard, as Stamfield was more than happy to sign-out for the morning.

"He's fine," Stamfield replied, "he's just lonely—I told him you'd be down to give him a deep tissue massage. Did you forget?"

Vickers only snorted a little outraged, contemptuous laugh, and Stamfield was out across the bay, into the lower deck hallways beyond.

It wasn't that far to the brig, where three Romulans and a Klingon had been cooling their heels for a week, after being scooped up on a what seemed to be a black-market trading run across the Neutral Zone. They knew the risks, and now they were just waiting for transfer, back to their own people, or to some nearby space-station where they could be traded for similar trespassers, caught on the other side, in the coming weeks or months.

"Here, try this," Stamfield said, after puzzling-out his own modifications on a new recipe card, at the food synthesizer across the corridor. Two burly red-shirts stood imposingly at the cell doorway as he passed a tray in to the Klingon. The smell of the food was not pleasing to the guards, who re-activated the brig force-field as soon as the smoking food had been taken.

"Quit wasting your time, Ensign," one of the security men muttered, as Stamfield passed a few steps into the corridor of the lower hull of the _Ticonderoga_.

"We're picking them up every two or three weeks—we might as well do something about getting along with them," the young junior officer shrugged, also speaking very quietly, almost impossible to hear over the loud buzzing of the force-fields that kept G'vul in one cell, and the Romulans in another, a few doors down.

"Don't let the captain—"the red-shirt caught himself, coldly—"don't let Commander Aladren catch you talking like that. We've got bigger fish to fry."

But suddenly the Klingon grew violent over the dinner-time offering, and threw it back out through the force field. As it zapped through the barrier, it sizzled and fried even more, in the sudden burst of lightning, and the tray kicked back and hit the Klingon in the face. Meanwhile, the sudden, extra cooking did nothing to improve the stench. And most of the smoking remains had splattered across the security alcove, outside the cell.

"No problem," Robert shrugged, gathering up the bowl and cup that had somehow escaped, and the food and soup that had swung out into the air along with them. "We'll try another one tomorrow."

"Bring me no more of these foul insults," G'vul snarled, turning away angrily. He was big, even for a Klingon, easily 220 centimeters tall, and 175 kilos. Not to be toyed with. Still, the Starfleet men could see his face was bleeding milky purple from where the tray hit him, right between the eyes.

"Ow, son-of-a-bitch…" Stamfield threw the Klingon's cup outward suddenly, and the red-shirts could see he had a long trickle of super-heated soup steaming down his forearm.

"Better get that taken care of, ensign," the oldest red-shirt grunted, not wanting to appear too caring in front of a Klingon.

"It's okay."

"That's an order, ensign," the senior red-shirt said, flatly. "That one, too," he said, gesturing at G'vul, and two younger security men hurried to the force-field, glad for some chance to parade their great monster out through the upper decks, like a pair of big game hunters. Some pretty yeomen might take note of their bravery.

"I would rather choke to death on my own blood!" G'vul said, refusing the medical care.

"That'd be fine with me, too," the security chief nodded, without much interest. "Take him upstairs."

A few minutes later, they were out of a turbolift, and marching around the great curve of deck five, the widest circle of this, or any of the great starships of the time—so long and curving it seemed to go on forever. They kept the prisoner between them, and Stamfield followed a respectful distance behind, embarrassed by the phaser they'd made him carry as a precaution. They should have simply used the turbolift to go laterally, but the two young security men seemed to prefer the walk.

Not to mention the fact that each ravishing yeoman they passed seemed literally caught off-balance as she stopped to stare in astonishment at the smuggler from the other side of the Neutral Zone, who dwarfed even the lumbering humans marching with him. One beauty after another nearly stumbled, and plastered herself against the bulkheads, to let them pass. It was strangely rewarding, even as Robert swerved left and then right to avoid stepping in Klingon blood, which dripped from G'vul's nose as they marched to sickbay.

The door _whisked _open, and the three giants squeezed through, ahead of him. He thought he could hear one of the nurses say "oh, my!" as they made their way into the office, and then to the more spacious wardroom beyond, on board _Ticonderoga_.

"Over there, please," the nurse said quietly, indicating an exam bed for the Klingon. There were two crewmen Stamfield didn't recognize, sleeping on two of the exam beds at the end of the two rows, their heartbeats and pulses bumping away up on the scanner boards overhead, as all four males from below decks assembled just inside that room.

The nurse, utterly fearless, got right up in G'vul's face, searching with her eyes, around his nose and cheeks, where the blood was still slowly seeping out. The Klingon, of course, refused to acknowledge her, until she quietly asked him to close his eyes.

"I will not!" G'vul said, with the usual defiance.

"Then your eyes will be stuck open for the rest of your life. You wouldn't want your face to freeze like that, would you?" she asked, like mothers all across the galaxy.

Finally, the Klingon closed his eyes, reluctantly, and Ensign Stamfield stepped back a bit.

It was just then, as Robert's eyes wandered in between the gaps, between one of the security officers and the hated G'vul, that he caught a glimpse again of one of the sleeping crewmen down the way, on a bed. He gasped, in a look of surprise that would surely have frozen forever, had the nurse not just warned the Klingon otherwise.

"Captain Safeer!"

The two security men looked at him as if he'd made a very stupid joke, and the nurse glanced back and forth between the two red-shirts, as if they were the arbiters of younger men's sanity, before deciding to ignore the strange outburst.

Robert did it again, snaking his head back and forth to peer between the Klingon and each of the two security men flanking him.

"Gravitational lensing," Ensign Stamfield smiled, and said very quietly.

"Shut up, ensign," one of the security men replied, thoughtfully.

"It's Captain Safeer, over there!"

"No, it's not," the red-shirt sighed.

"Come look."

"Ensign, I'll deal with you in a moment," the nurse sighed, as well, as if his very presence should be some kind of advanced endurance test for future caregivers.

"Look," Robert said very quietly, and firmly, and pulled the much beefier security man away from the Klingon for a moment, as the nurse sprayed something across the middle of G'vul's face, from a little canister.

So, the security man, and the young ensign from Saldana II stood there, both leaning left and right, peering across the shoulders of the other security man and G'vul, back and forth, back and forth.

"Do you see it?"

"No."

"Look at his face, over there, on the bed, between them."

"No—" the red-shirt froze. "It's the captain!" It was as if he were the one making the discovery, and not Stamfield.

And, sure as you're born, it was rather like gravitational lensing, the primitive way of seeing extremely distant galaxies in space, using closer objects, like nearer galaxies, to see between them, in the stretched fabric of space, which distorts like a magnifying glass, to reveal something otherwise invisible, much farther away. Just like that, they could only see it between these huge natural enemies, human and Klingon.

"Wait," the suddenly enlightened security man said, and he grabbed his fellow officer and the Klingon by the insides of their elbows, and pulled them closer to the two unconscious crewmen. Then, he grabbed the nurse, who was much smaller, and she sort of danced across to peer between them, just as he had, and Robert before them both.

"Doctor Yasimura!" the nurse exclaimed, turning to shout to the next room, and dropping the little canister, which rolled away.

And the process was repeated again, as the on-duty physician hurried in at the sound of her voice. Soon, another doctor, and another nurse were all excitedly viewing their beloved Captain Safeer, her hair bright red as she lay on the pillow asleep, viewed from a meter or so away, between these two huge but utterly bewildered and annoyed persons, the guard and the prisoner.

The doctors tried it with different positions, being scientific by training, and tried it viewing in other directions (revealing their first officer, as well, on the next bed), and finally the two security men changed places, so the one who was dying of curiosity himself finally got a look, too. There was much excited laughter and whispered analysis.

And the very next thing you knew, Dr. Yasimura was standing by the unconscious commanders, measuring out doses of anti-psychotic and anti-hypnotic drugs, as the others watched from outside the human-Klingon barrier, from this entirely new kind of "neutral zone." Finally, almost reluctantly, he placed the hypo's sprayer against the captain's arm, and pushed down on the drug capsule. _Hiss!_

"What's going on?" Captain Safeer said, her voice especially gravelly now, and looking as though she might have had a little too much to drink the night before, and checking the bed next to her, as if it must have been some hell of a party. She only looked surprised for a second, seeing First Officer Johnson, slowly rising after his own shot in the arm, on the bed next to her.

"Who's on the bridge?"

"Commander Aladren, ma'am," the security officer said.

"And we're still in the armada?"

The look of the suddenly crestfallen men and women all around her said otherwise.

"Let's go, let's go," Safeer said, at once trying to convince them everything would be all right in short order, but that even short order might not be fast enough, based on the strange collection of doctors and Klingons in the room.

"Him too," Safeer said, and she yanked the huge alien into the turbolift a minute later, along with the security guards and Robert Stamfield, all squeezed in together, the smallest human's forearm still burned from the faux-Klingon food.

"Report, ensign," the captain said, as they rode up to the bridge. Stamfield was momentarily caught off-guard, expecting the tough old red-head to turn to one of the monumentally huge red-shirts, but he gulped and proceeded as if it were a perfectly understandable account.

"We're going to capture, or kill, your assassins, ma'am. Orders of Starfleet."

Captain Safeer's mouth tightened as she restrained herself from stating the obvious, that she was not quite dead yet, though somewhat closer to retirement than to her first commission. They stepped out on to the bridge, and both the captain and the ensign stood behind the Klingon and the guards, for the best possible look. After a split second, Stamfield handed her the phaser he'd been carrying since he burned his arm.

"What's—" he couldn't even say "that!" before the captain had raised the weapon and fired over the Klingon's head, for she had seen it at least as quickly as he did: a very angry little figure, huddled up along the dome, in the lip over the science station, as they stood behind a very surprised Commander Aladren.

The green blast of phaser stun light faded, and a keeper's body tumbled silently to the deck, half-landing on the red railing before falling into a silvery heap: where the science officer was instantly examining it.

"Captain!" several commanders said at once.

"Status report, Mr. Aladren," she said, almost wedging the commander out of the center seat. Behind him, the science officer carried the keeper's body over to the turbolift, and one of the regular bridge security men followed them down to sickbay.

"I demand to be taken to my cell at once!"

Captain Safeer ignored the Klingon, and turned to Commander Aladren, at her right.

"We have to assume the other two ships are still under some kind of enemy control," she said, gritting her teeth as her chin rested on her fist. Her hair showed even redder under the lights before the turbolift. "So let's continue under protocol eight for now. Time to Rigel III?"

"One hour, seventeen minutes, Captain," Aladren said, as if the elegant Philippine had a clock in his own head.

"Captain," the navigator said, turning halfway toward her, from the helm.

"What is it, Rollins?"

"It's the _Enterprise_, approaching at warp eight."

"Send them a hail. Wait a minute," Safeer said, rubbing her forehead as she tried to figure out all this new information. "You," she said, to the giant Klingon, "stand over there—" She pointed to the far right edge of the big viewscreen at the forward end of the bridge. "And you," she said, to one of the big red-shirts, "over there," she indicated the far left of the viewscreen, so both were flanking it.

G'vul shifted uneasily, from his left boot to his right, in his dark merchant's clothing, his Klingon gabardine.

"If he moves, or makes a sound," Safeer said flatly, "shoot him." Several people around her blinked in surprise, but also relaxed suddenly at her firm hand on their fate once more.

"What do you think, ensign?" the captain said, without trying to appear humorous.

"Maybe closer together," Stamfield nodded, trying not to sound embarrassed, surrounded by senior officers on all sides.

"Let's start like this," Safeer shrugged. "Where's that hail, Emford?"

"Standing by, Captain," the communications officer said at once.

Safeer nodded silently, and the image of Rigel III on the viewscreen, growing larger, was replaced by a mirror-image of the bridge of the _Enterprise_. James T. Kirk was there, with his own Klingon, K'Toinne.

"Ah," Safeer nodded. "It looks like we're working along the same lines, Captain."

She waved to catch the eye of the security man, who stepped forward, down by the helm. And then he, in turn, waved the Klingon down with his phaser. On the screen, Jim Kirk actually blew a little sigh of relief from between his lips at the sudden sight of them.

"From the Neutral Zone, I presume," Kirk said, managing a smile, somehow.

"Yes, sir," Safeer replied, to the younger captain.

"And that would be Ensign Stamfield, to your left?" Kirk raised his eyebrows with a great pretense of innocence, as though he'd just pulled a rabbit out of his hat. But it was Safeer who smiled, now.

"No, Captain. _Lieutenant _Stamfield."

Robert had quite forgotten all about the burn down his arm by now.

"Re-engage protocol eight," Kirk said, before they dropped out of warp, entering the solar plane near Rigel.

"Protocol eight, aye, sir," Lt. Palmer said, over his shoulder.

"Unfortunate that we only have two Klingons between the two ships," Spock said, at Kirk's right, where the Vulcan had shifted, when the _Ticonderoga _called. "It would be nice to have that antagonistic blessing on board both ships, while exporting more of them to the _Defiant _and _Biruni_."

"Fortunate for you Mr. K'Toinne wasn't any more than a bantam-weight," Kirk smiled, glancing at Spock's nose, where the much smaller Klingon had walloped him a few hours ago. "If that bigger one hit you," Kirk speculated, remembering Lucille Safeer's prisoner, "it might have been a different story

"Mounting, in effect, a Klingon invasion of two more starships, simultaneously, could be highly problematic," he said, returning to the subject at hand, and folding his arms over his blue tunic.

"Yes, Mr. Spock," Kirk conceded, leaning this way and that in the big command chair, as if he'd just sat down on a pinecone. "Is there… any way to simulate the mental activity of our own keeper, in sickbay? Without actually giving him any of the power that went with it? Just to blend in, just… as camouflage."

Now Spock was truly flummoxed. His head half-shook sideways, as if he'd been punched again, and he rocked back on his pointy black boots for a second as he considered this dangerous new proposition.

"Making us a Trojan horse…" the science officer mused.

"On Saldana," Kirk ventured, "you and Vina seemed to be the equal of at least one keeper, in the space elevator." It was all he could do to remember through the smoke and flames and Imurians, and the mad dream of flying up in an electric chair, to face his own execution, but the less malignant memory still seemed to be mixed up in there, somewhere.

"If she is amenable, we may be able to join forces again—if Dr. McCoy can sufficiently restrain the Talosian."

"See to it, Mr. Spock," Kirk sighed. And he suddenly realized, "_if this doesn't work, we'll be right back where we started, with them in control of the _Enterprise, _and fresh out of Klingons_."

Down below, Mr. Scott, Uhura, Sulu and Chekov would probably all be asleep. But in a short time, the _Enterprise _would be on the brink of its next big confrontation.

"And you want to revive it enough," Vina asked, in stunned disbelief, as if the Vulcan might be joking, "to convince the other keepers its still in charge here?"

"Correct," Spock said, standing nearly at attention at her bed-side in sickbay. "Otherwise, all the might of those two captive starships would be turned upon the _Enterprise_, and _Ticonderoga_, all at once."

"You cant wake it up at all," she whispered urgently, her voice rising an octave, as if the keeper across the wardroom wasn't already under heavy sedation. "It will seize any opportunity to regain control."

"If we can bring it partially to consciousness, and combine our efforts—"

"Our two brains, together, barely equal half of one of theirs," she hissed, in a growing sense of outrage.

"But they lack the discipline or scientific rigor, or any formal understanding of the structure of thought processes."

"Don't be a fool," Vina insisted, "it will rage through our thoughts like an arsonist," she said, shaking her head, and looking him in the eye.

"Time is short, and we must stop the destruction of three billion lives on Rigel," Spock said, as if he were no longer interested in arguing the point. "If we survive," he added, at last, "there are a number of other memories for you to explore, of my years with Captain Pike."

It was a very blunt challenge to her human emotions, and she seemed strangely offended that he would suddenly attack on her most vulnerable level. Grudgingly, she rose from the high exam bed.

They set about their work very quickly: Dr. McCoy had placed a pair of solid, curved antennae around the crown of the sleeping keeper's bulbous head, to dampen its neural activity; and Spock and Vina were bent over the creature as if conducting intricate brain surgery with their bare hands, through its skull and skin and those terrible pumping veins. And K'Toinne was there at the ready (he assumed) in case someone needed to be punched in the face.

Chris Pike was at the height of his powers as captain of the USS _Enterprise_ though, as usual, this was of little use in an entirely new civilization, beyond the farthest outskirts of the United Federation of Planets.

The "boops" and "beeps" coming from the various control stations around the bridge had slowed down, along with the ship itself: she'd dropped out of warp space and now anything that passed, or came up on their sensors seemed to do so at a much less threatening pace. Little things became more ponderous, as asteroids and comets drifted by like rare fish in a public aquarium; even as the great interstellar structures, suns and black holes like whales and sharks compared to those smaller objects, suddenly faded far out into the dark distance.

He stepped down from the lift, and rested a hand on the shoulder of the captain's chair, even as Number One automatically leaned forward to get up. She stepped forward to the navigation side of the sweeping helm control, relieving a lieutenant in a similar gold tunic.

"Report," Pike said.

"Long range sensors indicate an M-Class planet," she began, in the vernacular of the day, "basically humanoid population, numbering about seven billion. Many nuclear weapons platforms in orbit, but no sign of major open hostilities, nuclear or otherwise."

"Too bad we can't just magically sweep in," Pike said, getting into the command seat, "and make them all go away. The platforms, I mean," he added, for clarity's sake.

"Standard orbit, try to avoid showing up on any weather satellites," he said as he folded his legs together, and a yeoman handed him a report for his signature.

And then, as if the keeper had suddenly become more conscious, or perhaps they had stumbled across some major, undiscovered chain of outside memories, the bridge of the Pike's _Enterprise _suddenly became crowded with murmuring faces and bodies writhing together, in some dark recess of the keeper's mind. Naked, some oily, as if to slip past another's defenses; all making fools of themselves, or fools of one another; all for the chance to simply be held or embraced or to cling and clutch together in a desperate moment of private weakness, or in overly proud private power: the triumph of all the chemistry of the brain, on a very small, common scale, crowded all around the command deck, and yet oblivious to the Starfleet officers.

Just as quickly as that, years later in the present, Dr. McCoy was fiddling with the creature's brain-waves again, and Spock's memory of that past mission came back to clarity before them. But in the moment of shock that followed, Vina's face seemed to waver, now and then, on Number One's, as if one or the other was merely a mask, in Spock's younger days.

"What is it, first officer?" Pike said, as the present-day Spock tried to address the problem through his memory of the captain.

"I don't know—some sort of ghost-image, Captain." Number One was still a little stunned at the graphic nature of the naked people a moment ago.

"From the planet?"

"Captain," the young Vulcan said, from the science station, "those visions did not register on our scanners." Behind it all, the older Spock knew why, but to stimulate a normal brain response, he tried to weave the mish-mash of old images together with those primeval sexual images from the keeper's own mind, in hopes of lifting their captive just barely to the threshold of mental activity—to camouflage them to the _Biruni _and the _Defiant_'s captors, to make them… fit in. Spock wondered, was this all the keepers were really interested in: the primal sexual imagery, barbaric and silent and faintly pleading? Or was it some new trap, this keeper had laid for them, while "playing possum"?

"Go to yellow alert," Pike said, still remembering those odd, hungry images: Arms and legs and backs and stooping or arching back in forbidden ecstasy. And silent, hungry mouths, like an overcrowded pool of coy fish, in a Japanese garden. "They did register on me, Lieutenant Spock."

Then, even worse than that first, deeply personal intrusion, was the sudden landscape of nuclear explosions all around, across some worthless, barren terrain. The initial flashes of each cut through the light like thrashing prisms, turning his shadows (on all sides) into flickering rainbows on the ground. The powerlessness, in that moment, was like being held underwater. And, when these newer images stopped, Pike found himself taking a long, deep breath.

Whole legions of drill sergeants in various boot camps around the galaxy, and across the ages, screamed in Pike's face and schoolteachers, angry and leaning down over him, exulted in their power, in some strange collection of images from another level of this keeper's memories.

All the while, in the distance, the hydrogen-style bombs exploded along each horizon… and then those sexual images, of naked people, reaching out at him, and him feeling strangled again, or drowned. Each element (perhaps) made some kind of sense in its own right but, taken as a whole series, as a montage of a mind, it was utter madness.

"Captain?" It was Number One, turned around in the navigator's chair.

"I'm all right," he nodded, trying not to shake his head clear, or make a fuss of any kind, under her concerned gaze. When she, too, realized she was looking too intently, she turned back to the image of a blue planet spinning below the _Enterprise._

And, by now, Captain Pike was so real to each of them, to Vina, to the Vulcan, and to the Talosian, that he attained a kind of rueful consciousness, a permanence and fullness of being that rivaled his own actual life too well. And all three of the telepaths in the modern sickbay could hear Pike thinking, "pressed together with a room full of naked strangers would almost be preferable to this strange, suffocating closeness in my mind." But he didn't know where the inner crowdedness came from. That was the worst part, being sane in a mad mind. Or was there just something as simple as the magnetic fields of this world?

"Get a landing party together, I'll meet them in the transporter room," he said, trudging heavily up to the lift. "Call Mr. Morgan to the bridge." He paused, forcing himself to think a moment, between the security guards at the lift doors. "Number One, Mr. Spock, come with me." They barely got into the capsule before the doors snapped shut again.

Neither Number One, nor the young Vulcan, could quite bring themselves to stare at their captain, who clenched the grab-hold in the lift with unusual tension in his hand.

"Captain, are you all right?" Number One finally asked, no stranger to the most straightforward of questions.

"There was just… something. Well, _two _somethings, two 'episodes,' and I don't know if they came from the planet, or…"

"Sickbay," Number One said, brushing his hand from the grab-handle without any ceremony whatsoever. The lift slowed and stopped its descent, and began sliding outward through deck five, and then sideways, cutting around the various cabins and offices and labs and control stations until it slowed and they stepped out, just down the corridor from the shipboard medical facility.

Neither of his subordinate officers could bring themselves to literally take him by the elbows, down the hall, but the effect of their serious faces and their complete and precise pacing made it impossible to think of Captain Pike as continuing forward under his own free will for the moment. He kept his head up, but seemed to be looking for any opportunity to close his eyes, feeling the two on either side, guiding him along.

At the same time, it was as if other forces were pushing him, compressing him, tighter and tighter, like coal into diamond, or elemental hyperbium into cast nutronium. But he didn't feel like he was turning into super-hard crystal, or super-heavy shielding for sun-divers, either. He felt like he was being crushed by forces unseen. His lungs were straining to breathe against more than one gravedigger's shovel that wedged inside his ribcage. Something cold was dripping into his belly, from inside.

"Well," Dr. Boyce said, a few minutes later, "it's nothing physical. You say it happened when we dropped out of warp?"

Pike nodded, and finally forced himself to speak. "I know it wasn't from inside of me, Phil. I know that for certain.

"Now, Chris, how could you possibly know that? Everything we think we know comes out of the way the brain juggles our senses, and what might be our perceptions; and puts them together with everything else we think we know. It might have come from outside, of course. Still…"

"Did anyone else…"

"We're not concerned about anyone else, at the moment, Captain. Maybe, if you weren't so good at keeping the crew in pretty much one piece, well then we'd have other people to worry about, now and then" Dr. Boyce said, kindly but firmly. He was looking into Pike's eyes, with a bright light, for perhaps the third time in the last minute and a half.

"Just give me a shot and I'll be fine," he said, sitting up straighter on the edge of the exam bed, embarrassed and impatient to be the focus of so much worry.

"I'll give you a shot—and you'll wake up next week, if I decide that's what's best," the doctor said, as a nurse watched over his shoulder. Number One and Spock stood a respectful few steps away, on the other side of the bed.

There were no signs of blast scars on Philip Boyce's face, and it briefly occurred to Vina that this new memory must have been from before, or perhaps long after, that incident with the hieroglyphic land mines, and Lieutenant Inez Freeman.

"You say you, and the others on the bridge, saw images of explosions, and people shouting, and some kind of collection of naked people," Boyce recounted calmly.

"He's the only one who seemed to be physically affected, Doctor," Spock said. Chris Pike was going to give the Vulcan a look of rebuke, but he doubted it would sink very deep into that orange skin.

"It didn't make any sense to me, either," Pike said, finally.

"I didn't say it didn't make sense," Dr. Boyce shrugged, his eyes going very serious as he reached over to the next bed and began going through a diagnostic checklist on a wedge-pad.

"Is this going to be another history lesson about the atomic age, Doctor?" In spite of his impatience, Pike was eager to show he was getting his wry sense of humor back again.

"It applies to any age, where people don't feel in control of their lives, or self-worth, or their past, or their futures."

"Like the atomic age," Pike sighed. Everything seemed to come back to the 'crisis times' that threatened to crack-open human history from inside, like a compound fracture.

"Like a hundred ages," Boyce said. "Okay, get out. Go down to the planet." But then he turned his attention to Number One, the unstoppable force of reason on board the USS _Enterprise_. "But if he starts to have another episode, send him right back up again, right away. Understood?"

"Yes, Doctor," the lanky brunette nodded, stepping forward, as if she would help the captain off the bed. Was she trying to antagonize him? The captain glanced at her, and slipped down to his feet with relative ease.

"Chris," the doctor said, as Pike led the first officer and the young science officer toward the wardroom door, "there's so much we don't know about the Universe."

"Don't worry, Doctor. I'll be careful." He disappeared out through the outer office.

"How can you be careful of something you don't even understand?" Boyce shook his head, as even the nurse abandoned him, wandering off to the lab next door.

General Hof, bored with the quartermaster, bored with the food synthesizers, and all the hairless females on board the USS _Enterprise_, finally sat down in one of the library rooms to see if he could find any memory of himself in the annals of Federation history.

Pretty yeomen buzzed around everywhere, collecting memory plaques from the reading areas, the tables, the comfortable chairs, the study booths, and along the long sweeping bench beneath the forward windows, where the crowded Rigel system spread out before them like a black table littered with billiard balls. But those beautiful young women, in their micro-skirts, were wasted on the Tellarite. He slowly caught on to the modern technology of the reader-screen, and narrowed his search down to his own particular legions of Tellar.

Nothing. As if he'd never existed. As if it had truly been a dream.

"Outrageous," he snarled quietly, his fangs grinding this way and that, at the vagaries of Starfleet histories. Was it all, then, merely the grand story of Earthmen in the end? And perhaps the story of how they used this alien or that, for their own expediency?

His hairy paws clenched and unclenched at the table. He blinked away tears of madness as he looked up at the distant red giant, Betelgeuse, bound to explode with devastating, horrifying power sometime in the next thousand years or more. And he dared it to do so, he wished it with all his might as he contemplated his own false existence, as the anger in his own head expanded like another red giant, to the point of bursting his skull wide open. He did not know himself anymore, and he did not know if it was the foolish illusions of Talos IV, or the foolish omissions of United Federation of Planets, that deleted him from his own history.

Against his own visceral reaction, he wished he were back in his cage again, where he could disappear at any time he chose. Where he could always look out and see his reflection on the clear barrier, or look up to see the water sprayers, and the stalactites pointing down like the drippings of eternity, like Heaven reaching down in its infinite slowness. He rushed out of the library room, leaving an overturned chair behind him, which two cute little yeomen hurrying to set right again, as if it were the most serious problem that might face them all night.

And he remembered the occasional keeper, almost floating along the silent rocky passageway outside his terrarium, and how he'd watch for any sign of recognition from any them, any sign of wonder ir even just recognition at the quarry they had caught. Once or twice he'd catch their eye, as they drifted past like great silent philosophers, but it was impossible to tell if they knew who he was.

He went out and around and around the broad curving corridor, till all the doors and crawlways and valves protruding from bulkheads were all streaming together, and his chest tightened and his back paws ached from padding along so quickly, and going nowhere. Tears streamed down his furry cheeks, until he remembered himself, and slowed to a walk, to gain some pretense of the dignity which had been stripped away. Until he remembered himself: whatever that was.

But then he had to stop at last, as the curving corridor seemed to race along and behind him, before coming into view endlessly around the next curve again. He rested a paw on the inner wall. It seemed he only knew how to be trapped. He shook himself, and shook away the sense of futility along with it.

It was a tremendous Universe, far beyond what any living being would ever come to know, and even if he had been known in the records of the _Enterprise_, as anything other than an emaciated castaway, he was still alive, and he was still in approximate command of his own faculties. Racing across empty space in some grand hollow shell, pretending to be going someplace, or escaping some terrible notion of insignificance, how was he any different from any of these other beings? Perhaps only in that he had survived something he deeply hoped none of them would ever have to face.

The paint was very pale blue, on the wall around his paw. It clenched and unclenched, and the paint beneath his claws showed no mark. He was in a kind of place where survival was possible, at last, and damage was not so easily incurred—where he wasn't constantly ransacking his own mind, to try to find a reason to stay alive, even as his keepers rummaged around in there, too, violating him on deeper and deeper levels, as each new box of memories was torn open and discarded, and perhaps another box was found inside, and another inside of that, all torn open, and thrown away. And now he was empty.

At the same time, he was ashamed, because he still hungered for the comfort of dreams.

_We've got to go… higher_, Spock seemed to be telling her, though "higher" seemed an arbitrary choice of words, as he and Vina and the rest of the landing party materialized with Chris Pike on a flight of steps down to some cellar door, on a side street in a large city, almost hidden in the foundation of a huge skyscraper. Spock continued to inhabit his younger self's image, and Vina was still hiding in the back of the mind of Number One. They and the other members of the landing party followed up the stairs to the street, one by one, careful not to be observed. Still, images of shouting authority figures and writhing naked bodies seemed to haunt Captain Pike, even as Spock knew it hadn't been that way when it actually happened, ten years before.

Somehow they were rummaging around in the lowest depths of the Talosian's mind, haphazardly stimulating all sorts of strange, primal imagery. Vina also seemed to be thinking aloud to Spock, and supposed the keeper's minds must have some conventional aspects: that a whole orchestra of brain activity could be called upon, but that, for any healthy mind, it should be conducted in a balanced, cooperative way, under normal circumstances. But that could almost exclusively only occur in a wakeful state, and that was the one thing they did not want while sneaking around in that giant head, on the pretense of living some dream, the fiction of a wakeful state, to pass safely along in a traitorous fleet.

A huge, rumbling purple snake seemed to be throbbing its way across the main street out beyond the sidewalk they'd beamed down to, and the serpent seemed to pour up out of one manhole in the pavement, while its endless body had begun hunching and bunching its way across the road, a good fifteen meters, to where its head had simply disappeared down into another manhole, some time before they'd arrived. The purple snake body writhed endlessly across the street level, without any sight of a head or a tail: only the undulating torso in between, making its way up from one subterranean passageway out across to another, and slithering down into hiding again, to make some connection to points unknown.

Up in the sky, beyond the tallest buildings, very thin, long black starfish seemed to spin slowly, like a flock of exotic alien birds, or helicopter blades without engines or cockpits or tails—slowly, slowly turning high above, all going in approximately the same direction, and then slowly out of sight against the dark yellow sky, coming from mystery, like the purple snake's torso, extending off into mystery, making only a brief and awkward public appearance.

"_How much of this is the keeper?_" Vina asked, as Number One turned silently to the younger Mr. Spock.

"_Unknown. On our original visit, this was a very normal humanoid planet, much like your own_."

It wasn't much like anybody's planet, as far as she could tell, anymore. Some nightmare haunted this one, automatically blended out from the mind they'd entered without permission. Here and there, she realized, amidst all the normal everyday pedestrians on the street, were also people walking along in sheets of flame, as if they were some far flung order of ancient Tibetan monks who'd doused themselves in explosive fuel, and then set themselves afire, to go walking out among the living, even as they burned to death, walking in a dream. Flames trailed up like long bridal veils of orange and yellow and red behind them, whipping upward in a non-existent breeze.

"_Everything is a-flame,_" she remembered the keeper saying, when it was questioned in sickbay the previous night. Here and there, like human meteors walking this way with one crowd, or that way in another crowd, these roaring infernos of humanoids in business clothing, men in suits and women in fiery silhouettes of skirts and jackets, blazed along the avenue, scorching the retina. But no one else seemed to notice.

Giant saffron hands seemed to be waving around frantically in the dark yellow sky, whether drowning in the well of space overhead, or violently finger-painting: hands as yellow as the stratosphere, as if shaping the wind itself.

"Report," Pike said, at last, as they'd taken it all in in a moment, like shocked psych residents on their first visit to some 19th Century Earth asylum.

"It wasn't like this," the young Spock insisted, shaking his head, and remembering to consult the tricorder in his own hands, before adding, "in our initial scans from up in orbit."

"It's crazy, like something out of Bradbury," Pike muttered, remembering a writer from long ago.

"Like the Martian woman on fire," Number One added.

Pike only nodded, except that there were at least four of these raging fires on two legs, here and there, on the busy street's sidewalks, walking along as if nothing were out of the ordinary. As if the long fires that whipped up behind them were whole-body scarves in a very mild winter.

Bright orange taxicabs slowly rolled over the big purple snake in the road, and they noticed that one of the cabs' passengers inside was engulfed in flames too, filling the whole backseat with fire and smoke as they passed. Somehow, it was a world gone wrong. That cab came to a stop, the man in flames reached forward through across the seat and paid his fare, and simply got out. They could see the backseat of the cab was still filled with smoke, when he opened the door. Dreams were on the outside now, or nightmares gone to play, or every wretched thing the mind was capable of had seized control: as if this world had quietly given up its code of conduct, forsaking some social contract of the weak and submissive. To Vina, it was a world gone to Hell.

"Psych readings, first on me," Pike demanded, and Number One had her tricorder against his head in an instant, adjusting the tiny levers and touch-screen with her other hand.

"Readings normal, Captain. If we can trust our own eyes," she added, bringing the tricorder down in dismay, letting it hang from a strap on her shoulder. Spock held his tricorder up to her head, in turn, and then to each of the other three landing party members, two security men and an ensign from xeno-biology, one by one.

"All registering within normal parameters," the Vulcan said, a minute later, with mild surprise.

"Stay together," Pike said, needlessly, stepping out into the street.


	10. Chapters 18 and 19

**Chapter Eighteen **

"Take us into standard formation, Lieutenant," James T. Kirk said quietly, every muscle in his back like a tightly strung instrument, as they seemed to drift into perfect position along with the other three black starships at point-five of impulse power. Beautiful Rigel III turned gently below, in the distance.

"Entering standard formation," Lt. Rhada nodded. She blinked as if a tiny droplet of sweat had got into the corner of one eye, as she worked just ahead of him at the helm. The forward lips of the other vessels spread out before him like great black balconies curving out on a starry night over R-3.

He compared the situation on board his ship, with that of the _Ticonderoga_—Spock was trying to keep up the fiction of "keeper control" here. And on board Captain Safeer's vessel, they'd stunned their keeper, and (probably) just thrown it into the brig.

"Signal _Ticonderoga_," he said, half turning to Lt. Palmer at communications. "Coded transmission, private channel: _Enterprise _sends its regards. Suggest you put your newest captive… in a semi-conscious state, to avoid suspicion among the telepaths." But how they could ever manage this without practiced telepaths of their own on board, to maintain control, was anyone's guess. He wasn't even sure Spock and Vina could manage it, even with Dr. McCoy manipulating "their" keeper's brainwaves, and with an unusually agreeable Klingon standing by to distract any human who might be overwhelmed next.

"_Ticonderoga _confirms receipt," Palmer nodded, turning briefly toward the center of the bridge.

Of course, there was no formal protocol for this sort of situation, though it resembled some "behind-enemy-lines" adventure, that was also, somehow, a wary struggle against invaders, who'd gotten behind his own lines, as well. But, he knew, very few things were ever entirely clear-cut.

_Now_, Kirk thought, _we just have to figure out a way to invade our other two ships, and get behind those enemy lines… _

"Captain," a young ensign said, from the helm next to Rhada.

"What is it?"

"It looks like the other ships are breaking-off from Rigel."

This was so strangely reassuring to Jim Kirk that he simply could not believe it, at first.

"Show graphic," the captain said, standing up, and stepping forward, between the two crewmen. Up on the viewscreen, curving grid-lines popped up to show where the other ships _should _have been continuing on toward the planet, and how they'd gradually veered, like lines on a graph, off to starboard. Even _Ticonderoga_, with its freed crewmen, had hastily changed course to stay with the pack. It wasn't much of a correction, but enough to miss Rigel entirely, from this distance.

"Any change in speed?"

"They're preparing to warp out, sir," Rhada said, her voice straining to be clear and precise as she studied energy fields at her fingertips.

"Course?"

There was the usual endless moment while Rhada (or any navigator) tried to examine the new headings, and the various obstacles that naturally lay in the way, before she spoke again, more quietly.

"Vulcan. Or Andor. Or possibly Earth," Rhada answered, as Vulcan and Andor were more or less within a line between Rigel and Earth, on a 3-D map.

"And they leave Rigel III behind, untouched…" Kirk nodded, thinking along the same lines. He began pacing, stepping down from the raised middle section where the center-seat and the helm were an island together.

"Why," he asked, lightly running one hand around the red railing that separated the upper control ring, as he walked back toward the lift, and around past the engineering console. "To generate… fear? Terror? Obedience? Or, because they're already there? And now they can make some… huge drama out of the previous starship attacks… to destroy the Federation's link to this part of space…"

Lt. Rhada could only shake her head, not knowing, as she watched the other ships continuing to power-up to leave the system.

"Shall I match for headings, Captain?"

"Yes, Lieutenant," Kirk said, pondering the sudden alterations to the ten-thousand light-year-wide chessboard before him. His only hope lay in how much it had changed already, in just the last five hours or so. He had his ship back, and at least one other ship of the line had gained its freedom, too.

The super-imposed grid-lines on the viewscreen gracefully collapsed back against the black sides of the other ships ahead, as the _Enterprise _changed to follow, and Rigel slipped from view. As far as the other ships were concerned, the _Enterprise _was in complete alignment with them again.

And finally, to Kirk's undying relief, the lift doors behind him opened up and Mr. Scott stepped out, in his red tunic and black slacks. He didn't look weary or ashamed anymore. Instead, as Kirk exchanged a purposely vague little nod with the head of engineering, he decided the Scotsman looked predictably angry, though he held his temper in check as he stood at Kirk's side, both men behind the captain's chair.

"Any sleep?" Kirk asked.

"Aye, just enough," Scotty allowed, glowering at the viewscreen as the other three starships' great engines began to fire up.

"Better get us up to speed, Engineer," Kirk smiled, conceding to the inevitable pursuit.

"We'll be right there, Captain, with 'em to the end of it," Scotty said, his mind clamping down on the task at hand, like a bulldog. He pulled himself up to the engineering console, where an ensign had kept everything in hand for the night. And with barely a brush of his hands, you could hear the entire warp-power of the _Enterprise _kick-in, humming up from the depths of its good night's rest.

"Standing by, Captain," he said, now fully alert and feeling useful once more.

"Helm," Kirk said, leaning back against the rail, as if to prepare for the incomprehensible acceleration to come, as if there was no such thing as inertial dampeners in the 23rd Century. "Estimate warp settings of formation."

Lt. Rhada inhaled and read back and forth, at least twice, the sensor data along the wide instrument panel. "Looks like they're going for maximum sustained warp, factor eight, Captain."

"Engine status?"

"Standing by," Scotty nodded, all business now.

"As soon as they go," Kirk said, watching and feeling like an imposter walking into some hideous costume ball, sure to be found out at any moment.

"Ready."

The silent "blip" of each ship whisked them away, one by one, leaving only a momentary illusion of three separate "pinched" spaces, where they'd been just a second before. And then the _Enterprise _did the same, so the other ships were suddenly visible again, in the computer generated image on the screen, amidst the rush of the stars.

"Take the con, Mr. Scott, keep us alive. I'll be down… in sickbay." He gave one more glance at the viewscreen before he finished speaking, wishing he had some kind of a plan.

"They've been like that the whole time," McCoy said very quietly, as Kirk stared at the Vulcan and the beautiful blond castaway, leaning over either side of the captured keeper. The halo of brainwave focusing antennae rose like two matching ski-jumps around the very top of its head. And, looking bored out of his mind, K'Toinne sat on a chair nearby, arms folded.

"Any word, any… commentary?" Kirk suddenly seemed as impatient as the Klingon.

"Something about 'going higher,'" McCoy said, shaking his head, as the two men watched the motionless struggle. Kirk remembered being back on Saldana several days ago, and the sight of Spock similarly transfixed, before that terrible… thunderstorm: eyes clenched tight, and then staring at nothing, transfixed. Vina just seemed … angry, her brow lowered, her glistening hair almost brushing the naked, throbbing head on its pillow.

"'Higher,' as in brainwave activity? Can you adjust the frequencies, Bones? Bring it a little more awake?"

"Without getting Spock's advice first? I don't know if that's a good idea, Jim. We don't even know what he's up to, in there."

"Just try the smallest increment upward," Kirk urged, intrigued by Spock's strange words, and wondering if they could be stronger against the keepers through some minor tinkering.

Shaking his head again, McCoy gingerly stepped around behind Spock, hoping the Vulcan might snap-out-of-it enough to realize what was happening, and cast his own vote in the matter. But the science officer just kept his head down, next to the keeper's: his sharp-cut dark bangs hovering back and forth, ever so slightly, like a buzz saw against their captive's temple.

The antennae had only a few dials, and McCoy was careful to check the enigmatic screen above the bed, to watch for any sudden activity. Now there was a wavering, electronic whir, as the wavelengths grew shorter and more energetic.

Kirk didn't hear the _swish! _of the outer sickbay door when it opened but, unexpectedly, General Hof slowly entered the wardroom from the office, as if called in from across the ship by the high-pitched warbling. He seemed to be wandering deep in thought, or lost in some slow-moving fog, visible only to himself.

He paced, like a sleepwalker, across toward the keeper on its tablet. It was impossible to read the general's expression, but perhaps he most resembled a concert pianist about to strike the first dramatic chords in some immortal symphony, before a great assemblage in a darkened theater. His hairy arms came up, as he reached the foot of the bed, and his back seemed arched in his big colored, transparent suit.

The Tellarite stood there, breathing roughly, a wetness coming into the usual faint snorting through his snout. And, in a strange, pitiable way, his lower jaw was working back and forth, as if he were trying to eat something impossible to digest, like a starving man chewing on his leather belt. And now and then, as Kirk watched and listened, Hof also seemed to swallow a tear at the back of his throat.

McCoy barely acknowledged this strange sight though, with four beings crowded around (counting himself), it was getting a little close in the air above his patient.

General Hof stood there for at least a full minute, as Spock and Vina sat frozen in grim concentration, near the two cerebral antennae, and Dr. McCoy adjusted the wavelengths again, very slightly. Finally, the Tellarite sunk to his knees at the side of the bed, and tenderly grasped the sleeping keeper's hand in his great paws. His chest shook with sobs as he pressed the little hand close to his shining black eyes.

"Take me back, master, take me back," Hof sobbed quietly, as he knelt on the floor, to Kirk's undying embarrassment. Finally, the starship captain walked up behind him, and gently lifted him to his back legs once more, still shaking with tears. The captain wrapped his human arms around the Tellarite, and helped him to sit on the next bed. The general had nothing else left, but his captivity.

He looked at one corner, where the bulkhead met the ceiling, and then at another corner, up above, as if he thought the room should be much higher, or he should be much smaller. He would not regard the others in the wardroom, even as Jim Kirk hoisted himself up on the bed, sitting next to him. It was beginning to look like an old time hospital amphitheatre, with all these people crowded around one motionless alien, as if some delicate World War One operation were going on, and Spock and Vina were holding down the patient's body.

There was a horrible silence, as the Tellarite simply stared at nothing, or nothing of significance. Frozen in place, he seemed incapable of any movement.

"Now I am nothing," he said, at last.

"What are you talking about," Kirk said quietly, so as not to wake the fearsome creature before them, on the next bed.

"Nothing!" Hof said, as if it was obvious. "I do not even have a self. This is all the hangover of a million false dreams."

"You… stood by me," Kirk said, becoming fiercely loyal, and sitting up straighter now. "You kept me from killing an innocent woman," he remembered, though in the end Mrs. Vedder was almost literally swallowed-up by the mob, anyway. You helped me through the ordeal on Saldana, going down into the mass murder and the waste pits with me, even though you were unarmed. You saw me through the collapse of the super-tower; and in the escape from my own ship, hunting me down to kill me. You even sang and drank with me, though I should have felt like a fool! You stood by me every step of the way. So… if you're just the hangover of a million dreams, General…" Kirk trailed off, shaking his head in amazement, "I'd be… _afraid…_ to meet the original!"

General Hof, or whoever he was anymore, let out a wet little laugh at that, sounding surprised and amused and perhaps a little scornful of flattery all at the same time. He blinked once, as if he'd made some life-altering decision.

"Why do they work so hard to keep it alive," he muttered, bitter at the folly of dreams.

"It might be the only thing that can save us, ironically, till we can regain the other ships." And Kirk explained again how they hoped to follow the _Biruni _and the _Defiant_, and the freed _Ticonderoga_, all the wayback toward Earth if necessary, to prevent any more terrible death and destruction along the way.

"Then I was right to kneel! You see? I was quite right, at that particular moment!" Suddenly, far from shame and even ending it all, the Tellarite was unexpectedly bursting with pride again.

"Well, I suppose—" Kirk shrugged. But it was too late for any subtle planning, as Hof leapt back down to the deck again, on his knees, along-side of Spock, and grabbed that tiny alien hand again, as if he'd push his entire world's history into the keeper in just a few seconds, if it would help distract the sleeping telepath, and help the others in their scientific experiment.

Then, very gingerly, and politely, but with quick simplicity, Mr. Spock's left hand came down along the side of the bed, and up into the crook between Hof's lowered head and his shoulder, to give the general a quick, strategically delivered neck pinch. The Tellarite tumbled harmlessly to the floor, where Kirk quietly rearranged him, so he'd be a little more out of the way. He looked up to see the Klingon watching him, from behind.

"I suppose you think this all looks very civilized," K'Toinne said, with great diplomacy, and a faint little smile, in his chair against the wall.

"No, I'm afraid I don't," Kirk admitted, hovering over the Tellarite, who was breathing softly, but not moving. Suddenly he remembered the Klingon's words, of how it seemed that humans dragged their madness around with them like a child and its toy.

"Not that I'm trying to lord it over you," the young Klingon shrugged, where he sat. "But one does get a bit tired of the other side always claiming to be… more advanced." This, as the silent voodoo-like scene, the reverse-exorcism of good spirits into bad, continued before them.

"Our dreams are our greatest asset," Kirk said, unapologetically. "It would be… unreasonable to assume they'd never become our greatest liability, too."

"Wouldn't it be much simpler if you all just said what was on your minds, instead of trying to be all prim and proper, and bury things to the point where they woke you up in the middle of the night? No Klingon ever loses sleep over… well, over anything, really." The whole idea of humanoid guilt and shame seemed utterly alien to him.

"That certainly explains a lot," Kirk said, watching as General Hof came out of the nerve pinch's effect. His transparent colored suit, with its glitter-trimmed panes of dark red and blue and amber and green, shone in the lights as he stirred.

"Oof, my head," the general said, trying to prop himself up on his elbows. Suddenly he was panting, as if he were in pain.

"Not so fast," Kirk said, putting a hand on his big ursine shoulder.

"I'm not in the cave?" He sounded almost hopeful and a little embarrassed. But he still seemed a bit dizzy.

"No," Kirk said.

"What are you doing down here," the Tellarite demanded, quietly.

"It's all right."

"You've a Klingon one side, and a keeper on the other, and you tell me it's all right?" Hof said, clearly wondering if Kirk himself might be the one who really was back on Talos IV.

"The enemy of my enemy," K'Toinne quoted, from long ago, "is my… Whatever. I get confused."

Judging from Kirk and Hof's expressions, the Klingon wasn't the only one.

There were still burning pedestrians walking along with all the others, on the busy street, like nobody's business. And their flames still whipped up like huge, Chinese dragons. Gradually, the young Lieutenant Spock worked his way into the crowds flowing this way and that, and got his tricorder up next to one for a reading… which was odd, because the older First Officer Spock knew perfectly well these unfortunate beings, these walking infernos, were only apparitions from deeper down in the slumbering Talosian's mind. But, for the sake of consistency, the older Vulcan sent his younger self out into the street to have a look. It would not do, to rouse the keeper's slightest suspicions, by simply ignoring the fiery manifestations.

Now, overhead, there was the faint, flickering image of Dr. McCoy, a giant towering over the city, as he delicately raised the keeper's mind slightly closer to consciousness. The flames of the passersby flickered up like unregarded offerings from the street.

"_Too much,_" Spock tried to think at McCoy, though the chief medical officer still appeared and disappeared overhead, like a sun behind the clouds.

"What's that, Lieutenant?" Captain Pike had also waded into the crush of people swarming this way and that.

"_Too much_," both Spocks repeated. Then, only the younger, more easily entertained Vulcan elaborated: "It's an old slang term from your Earth. It refers to something that is 'exceedingly unusual.'"

"Too much," Pike nodded in agreement, looking around. And, to his own relief, Spock noted the doctor's image overhead had faded away, into that choking yellow color again that was this planet's sky. Another flock of black starfish spun by again, far overhead.

"They read as perfectly normal," Spock said, barely glancing up at the sky again. And, normal or not, each member of the landing party still seemed vaguely horrified, as another person went walking by, perpetually burst into flames, for every thirty or fifty others who passed, unaware. That was even stranger, the total acceptance of the billowing infernos that moved among them.

"This is _not_ Hurana VI," Number One said, after staring at the sun, and holding her own tricorder up to the daytime sky for familiar stars that only it could see. Deep inside, Vina knew it could only be Talos IV.

"Transporter malfunction?" Pike sounded unusually disinterested, or perhaps more interested by the narrow, narrow focus of each set of humanoid eyes he tried to catch, on the busy street. You could have kissed your foot on the busiest street corner, and no one would have stopped to notice.

"Equipment registers normal, Captain," the first officer replied, even as the young Vulcan checked his own scanner, too.

"Can you get our position?" Pike asked, looking down into the little screen, his square jaw next to hers.

"Uncharted world, some similarities to—Captain, this is not the present day." She didn't sound alarmed, but like a companion checking a large map in growing interest.

"Check your figures, Number One," Pike said, barely able to suppress a smile, as he used her own well-worn phrase against her now.

"Interstellar positions indicate we're approximately… a 750,000 years ago—I mean, back in time, three-quarter million standard years. That also makes this system's place and name harder to get, by our own records."

Spock hurried to check her figures, too. But he knew better than to give a more exact number. Instead, he held his own tricorder up to the sky, as they stood, out of the way, against a tall building's stone facing.

"Fourth planet in a system of at least seven worlds," the science officer said, slowly turning to get the full half-sky.

"Contact the ship," Pike nodded, "I want to know what happened." Even he barely glanced now, as another raging fire got out of another cab, along with a non-burning wife and two children.

"Aye, sir," Number One said, opening a communicator. After a few tries, she closed it again. "Some kind of interference, blocking our signal."

"Let's see if we can get out in the open. Is there any sign of a signal-dampener around here?"

"Scanning," the Vulcan said, his gaze becoming fixed on the little computer that hung from his neck.

"Captain," Number One said, quietly, pointing upward.

One of the black starfish was slowly spinning down toward the street above them, its arms seeming to flash in and out of existence, coming down like the arms of the creature hoping to grasp something between the buildings. It may have connected for a second to a few of the upper floors of this building or that, but, one arm and then another, was here and gone, here and gone, so they couldn't quite figure it out.

"Some kind of transport?" Pike watched as the starfish seemed to relax and slip back up into the sky again, as another spinning flock drifted by, and the flames licked up from the sidewalks. Maybe the spinning arms, or wings, were strobing, spinning so fast they seemed intermittent, but it was just one more element of an almost painfully strange world. It could have been some alien technology, some technological effect he was seeing, but it wasn't like any cross-town lifter he'd ever seen before.

Then, all at once, the buildings of the city seemed to heave a great sigh, like a sleeping jellyfish, and everything came down from the "inhale" in a distinctly different shape—the buildings all seemed to have come out of a totally different school of architecture, as quickly as that. Where they had been fairly typical spires and arches and hopeful as upturned hands in prayer, the whole skyline seemed twisted, with curving, intertwining trunks that stretched up a hundred floors or more, and many of which ended in a kind of tornadic wind-swept shape, like the tops of bare trees stretched off toward… the north? They were like the flaming humanoids themselves, now, raised to gargantuan stature.

"Did you see that?" Pike asked, unnecessarily.

"Affirmative," the young Spock said, pursing his lips in the exact same manner as the older Spock, in sickbay, where he was bent over the keeper.

"The people, in flames, the buildings that look like flames… at the top: like torches carried over… some angry mob." Chris Pike seemed like he was about to say something else, but he thought better of it. Things were crazy enough, without added speculation. He turned to examine the entire visible city with growing suspicion.

"Something's going on here," was all he said, after a long pause, no longer staring at the building-tops, like torches, or the torch-like people hurrying by.

"Agreed," Number One said, giving a serious nod to the two security men, who took their phaser-pistols in hand.

"Captain!" It was the young Spock, looking down at his arms, which were in flames. For a full three seconds, everyone in the landing party simply stood and stared, against the tall building's foundation. They couldn't beam him back to the ship without a clear signal and, at the same time, it didn't appear a body engulfed in flames posed any real concern on this inexplicable world.

Spock quickly stripped himself of his equipment, handing the tricorder and communicator and compact phaser to Number One for safe keeping. And just that quickly, his whole body was a raging inferno, fueled by what, they could not say. They could barely make out his features beneath the sheets of fire.

"How do you feel?" Pike asked, as Number One held out her own tricorder, scanning the science officer for medical readings. The sound of the flames was a steady deep rustling, a kind of slowed-down, campfire's roar.

"No change," Spock said, though he saw them, and the whole city through a veil of fire.

"No sign of blood combustion," Number One said, quizzically, but seeming to try to reassure the other officers, as people continued streaming in front of them on the sidewalk. That was one particular concern about Spock, under the circumstances: the literal explosiveness of certain components in his blood. Whole songs and books and operas had been written around the phenomenon (which seemed to be tied to the copper content of his hemoglobin)—but, like so many romantic notions, all those fictions were forgotten in the moment of greatest danger. Now Spock's entire appearance was only the outline of his usual self, beneath some man-shaped bonfire, somehow constructed on this walkway, against all code.

Captain Pike stretched out his hand, into the flames, along-side Spock's head. It seemed dangerous and tender at the same time, like a loving father reaching out to his son in some very obvious kind of destructive turmoil. Then, after a moment, he pulled his hand back, looking at both sides in wonder.

"This is crazy," Pike said. His own flesh wasn't burnt at all.

"Request permission to go engage one of the others like… myself," Spock said. They could barely see his eyebrows risen up on his forehead, in youthful strategizing, behind the flames.

"Affirmative, Science Officer," Pike said, with a glint in his eye, at the young man's impetuousness. "At least we'll never lose him in the dark, now," he smiled, at the two hulking security guards nearby.

Number One handed him back his tricorder, now apparently quite safe in spite of the undeniable wraith of fire, and he was off, marching out into the steady flow of people and cars, gingerly jumping over that endless purple snake's body.

After the slightest hesitation, Pike and the others followed, too.

"Gentle being," Spock said, lightly placing his hand on the upper arm of a man in some kind of tailored business suit, likewise engulfed in mesmerizing orange and yellow flames. The man turned, with a mild start. "Excuse me," the young Vulcan hurriedly added, as their flames roared up overhead, "but could you explain this harmless display of pyrotechnics?"

There was something strangely cold and fixed in the man's eyes, which the older Spock recognized right away.

**Chapter Nineteen **

**CAPTAIN'S LOG Stardate 2307.15: ** _We continue in formation with ships commandeered by the telepaths of Talos IV, on apparent course toward Earth. First Officer Spock, and Vina (a former castaway and specimen on Talos) are probing the mind of one of her former jailors, looking for some practical way to halt the invasion, and the destruction, of the Federation._

"I don't know, Jim," Doctor McCoy said quietly, slipping around behind Spock, and out into the area between the two rows of beds. Dr. Aristide had come in to relieve him, being a xeno-neurologist by training. The small blond Latina hopped up on the adjacent bed and fixed a very cool, steady gaze on the neural antennae rising up on either side of that great Talosian brain, as if she were a cat who could wait indefinitely, outside a mouse's hole.

"I don't know either," Kirk was rubbing his own temples now, as if he'd been the one using his own brain to keep the keeper from regaining consciousness for the last hour. Spock and Vina looked like they were deep in fervent prayer, over the alien's skull, and General Hof and K'Toinne were crouched against the wall at the end of the room, looking like bored prison inmates, once more.

"Look, it's not my place to say, I'm not some great strategic thinker or anything," the doctor said quietly, as they stood in the doorway to his office, "but if the _Enterprise _and _Ticonderoga _are just pretending to go along with this madness, why don't we fire on those other two ships first, and disable them before any more innocent lives are lost?"

Of course, the same thing had occurred to the captain. But he had the luxury of a few days' travel time, and who knew what might happen till they reached the Earth? He didn't dare send a message there, not knowing if the home world too had been devoured, by mad passions and bizarre delusions.

"We still can—or, maybe Spock can find some other way. Or," Kirk shrugged, with a great show of nonchalance, "maybe we'll find a whole boat-load of Klingons around here, somewhere, and we can sneak them onto the other ships…" The prospect was exciting, but seemingly impossible. The Klingons would require so much security, just to get them on board the other _Biruni _and_ Defiant_… and God only knew what would happen once they got there…

"If we could get just… _one _Klingon up on each bridge… through the escape pods?" Kirk was suddenly enthralled by the idea. He couldn't help glancing down the row at K'Toinne, imagining his sudden emergence on one of the enemy bridges… If Captain Safeer could give up her own Klingon, too, the giant G'vul, they could finish the job in half the time.

"Jim, you think they wouldn't know you're clamped right there on the dome in a shuttlecraft?"

"Maybe," Kirk allowed, with a smile at the challenge of it all. He turned to leave, knowing the good doctor was about to explode, now that the captain had winked and taken the bet.

"And what happens if this keeper should suddenly revive when we've got no Klingon?" McCoy no longer cared about maintaining hospital silence, as he charged after the captain, back into the outer office.

"If it doesn't work? No promotion for you," Kirk guessed.

"You can't promote me," the chief medical officer said, practically shouting now, "because I don't want to be captain!"

"Neither do I," Kirk said, barely aloud, and walking out into the busy corridor.

When McCoy turned back into the wardroom, his jaw clenched, the Tellarite and the Klingon were speaking quietly at the end of the bed rows.

"I suppose I looked like a great fool," Hof said quietly, looking straight ahead, though he was speaking to K'Toinne next to him on the deck.

"Why?"

"I wanted to go back, to go back into captivity. I only want to live and die in proud dreams."

"That's funny," K'Toinne said, humorlessly. "Where I come from, they put you in captivity if you _aren't_ wrapped up in some proud dream."

Jim Kirk was half-way down to the turbolift when he heard a familiar shuffling behind him. It was General Hof, appearing around the curve of the main corridor of deck five. In an instant, the captain could see the Tellarite was anxious to come along.

"One more adventure, General?"

"Of course, and then one more after that!" Hof exclaimed, as they were closed-up inside the capsule, and it rode back to the ship's neck, then down toward the shuttle bay. Clearly, he had forgotten all about his dread of his own anonymity.

"Feeling up to it?" Kirk asked quietly, though it was generally considered a potentially rude question, among males of any species.

"Of course, of course!"

Kirk dared a brief, side-long glance at the freed captive, who longed for his captors just minutes ago.

"You don't believe I am capable!" Even in his misery, a Tellarite could issue a blustery challenge with the best of them. He sounded ready to start a fistfight right there in the lift, to prove his worthiness for combat. His crinkly plastic suit took wild reflections from the capsule lighting, and his elbows came up till nearly half the lift seemed full of him, looking fearsome.

"All right, all right, you win," Kirk smiled, astonished that he ever doubted the brave warrior.

"Don't smile, Earth man! I told you!"

"All right, all right!"

"When Earth men smile, it means _goodbye_! It's bad luck!" the general repeated, very stern and quiet now.

"Not for Earth men," Kirk shrugged, with devilish pleasure.

"Ugh!" The Tellarite was not amused. The lift doors opened in that little passageway outside the hangar airlock.

A half a minute later, they were walking into the great open space of the shuttle bay, where their—or, by right of honor and commitment, where _K'Toinne's_ deadly black scout ship had been resting.

Two lieutenants, Kyle and O'Brian, were sitting under the vicious-looking little craft, standing on its black jointed struts, both junior officers looking up into one of the miniature phaser cannons.

"How's she holding up, gentlemen?" Kirk asked, as the two crawled out from under, looking a bit envious.

"I'd hate to come up against one of those in battle, Captain," Kyle laughed. O'Brian, a man of few words, and seemingly endless astonishment, only nodded his head in admiration.

"I'd take you along," Kirk said, as he touched the sensor-pad by the hatch. The thick black doorway popped open with a very serious _k-chunk! _"But… the fewer humans, the better, I'm afraid."

"This is what I say, too," General Hof nodded, climbing up into the hatch first, being of superior rank.

They seated themselves back in the familiar padded seats, and Kirk initiated the warm-up pre-flight, as Kyle and O'Brian disappeared back into the ship's protective airlock.

"You will not take the Klingon?" Hof rubbed his fore-paws along his thighs, nervously.

"We'll pick one up along the way, General," Kirk said, watching the big curving hangar doors slowly open before them.

"They will not gladly part with theirs," Hof said, quietly.

"I don't think it's the same situation over on the _Ticonderoga_," Kirk said, philosophically.

"How then?"

"They don't have any telepaths, at least none that I'm aware of, over there. So… theoretically…" and now the black scout ship was floating out the back end of the _Enterprise_, "they won't have their keeper anywhere up near consciousness. And if their keeper isn't conscious," Kirk reasoned, "they don't need a Klingon to protect them. At the moment." He made it all sound very neat and tidy. Almost.

"You could steal a bride from the altar, Earth man," the general snorted.

Kirk was careful _not _to smile.

Just as easily, the scout ship slid across the formation, into the bay of the blackened _Ticonderoga_, and its great segmented doors slid shut in silence. Once the pressure was restored by the blowers overhead, a ground team ran out from the airlocks to secure the craft to the deck, and the two senior officers climbed out. At the airlock, Captain Safeer did not look too happy to see them.

"Klingons have become a precious commodity, all of a sudden," she grumbled, resting her hands on her hips, in a great show of command stoicism, and the ground crew ran back to the airlock behind her. A missive of steam shot out the top of the black scout ship, as if to indicate something near the boil.

"I promise to bring him back in one piece, Captain," Kirk said, feeling like a teenager asking to borrow the car on a Saturday night. At the airlock, two big security men appeared with the even bigger G'vul. None of them looked very happy.

"You're just going over there by yourselves?" Safeer said, quiet but incredulous.

"A Tellarite must do what a Tellarite must do," General Hof nodded, completely assured now.

She looked at them as though they were both insane, but then gestured to the pair of red-shirts across the bay. It took both of them, seemingly, to push the Klingon across the deck, and their phasers never wavered from the kill-shot.

As they approached, Kirk drew his phaser, just to show good faith in their judgment. G'vul had his arms behind him, and his wrists shackled in glowing saddle-hoop handcuffs, the same color as a brig's force-field. He looked as fearsome as ever, though.

One of the security men had a foot on the little ladder to the hatch, and you could see his giant bicep flex in his sleeve, as he hung from a grab-rail on the side.

"You're staying here, boys," Captain Safeer said, ruefully.

"Could you manage to part with Lieutenant Stamfield?" Kirk asked. But this was clearly more than Safeer could brook, and her arms went straight down to her sides, breaking that pose of heroic indifference.

"Now just a minute," she snarled.

"I just want to make his mother proud!"

"You just want to make his mother cry, is more like it," Safeer disagreed, imagining the worst.

"We shall give him a phaser of his own," General Hof said, grandly, clearly above all of this tedious human travail.

"We've got phasers coming out our asses, thanks very much," Safeer said, a hard edge coming into her voice, and a look that even shook the general, a bit, combined with her gravelly voice. "What we don't have is a lot of people who can watch and think and get ahead of something before it's too late!"

Suddenly, for the one-millionth time, Jim Kirk realized how lucky he was on the _Enterprise,_ with his own officers and crew. The great hanger arched overhead, and he tried to look humble in the face of her concern. Humble, and yet perfectly calm and certain.

She watched him, with growing amusement, cycling through his various boyish expressions for just the right combination of bravery and trustworthiness.

"Are you done?" she asked quietly, as he reached the perfect aspect of good salesmanship.

They listened to the guttural breathing of the Klingon for a second, like dangerous animal stuck in a pen.

"Males," she drawled, as if her dour resignation was exactly what all they ever really wanted to hear. Then she had to shake her head, realizing they might not be coming back at all.

"Transfer the prisoner," she growled, though she still wasn't sure how to keep her own Talosian asleep without killing him, or keep him awake enough to reassure the keepers on the other ships in their formation.

The Klingon seemed surprised and offended to be turned over to the little human and the pudgy Tellarite, under the authority of an old Earth woman, of all things. But, just like that, the red-shirts shoved him through the hatch, and hustled him down to the dank cabin that had been Krishtakonka's.

When Jim Kirk thanked the other captain, and he followed down the gangway after the redshirts, he could see they'd hoisted G'vul's giant arms up on to a peg in the wall, and somehow quickly pinned his great black boots to some support brackets in the corner. He did not look like he'd be any less trouble, even all trussed up.

Then Kirk heard boots clanging on the ladder outside, and the hatch closed, and he turned to see the young Stamfield looking both ways behind him, before tentatively squeezing up in to the gangway. Captain Safeer and her two guards walked back to the airlock, and the pressurized door closed behind them.

"Permission to come aboard?" The younger man said, in the narrow passageway.

"Granted, come up and have a seat," Kirk nodded, as he passed on the way up to the cockpit. Mrs. Stamfield's older son watched as the captain worked the controls and the great crescent-shaped louvers slid open ahead of them, in the vast _Ticonderoga _shuttle bay. Without any particular sensation of rising or moving, as far as either man was concerned, the bay slowly disappeared behind them, and they were out among the streaking stars. Behind them, General Hof folded his paws on top of Kirk's seat, looking perfectly calm.

It was just as quickly that Kirk saw the attacking phaser trails, splaying brilliantly past them, from the other ships. The _Ticonderoga,_ behind them just a moment before, had spiraled away like a tiddlywink to escape the fiery rays.

In an instant, Jim Kirk knew that one of two things must now be true: either the keeper on board Safeer's ship had woken up, or it had fallen too deep asleep to maintain its part of some invisible telepathic network with his brethren. And now Kirk, and Safeer, and all of them were found out.

As he scanned the instruments, he could see the _Biruni _and_ Defiant _powering up, and locking on him next for attack.

"Captain," the young Spock said, even as the roaring flames engulfed him, "this world is not as we'd assumed."

"Explain," Pike said, after watching the young Vulcan with the equally strange native, on that busy city street.

There was no point in lying about it, the real Pike had been dead for ten or twelve weeks now, but the keeper on the _Enterprise _must be fed with dreams, while they tried to stop its deadly work.

"These people, apparently consumed by flames, appear to be the ancestors of Talos IV. And all of this seems to be a construct of their world, before it was destroyed in some final war."

"How did we end up here," Pike said, his face going stern, though his voice sounded calm.

"Unknown," Spock prevaricated, or delayed explaining, as small trails of fire followed his fingers along the controls of his tricorder.

"Captain," Number One said, "all these beings have completely de-centralized circulatory systems. No hearts."

It was impossible to say, just from looking at them, for they had not even begun to evolve, yet, into the top-heavy beings they'd one day become, a three-quarters of a million years later.

"Are you able to communicate with it, Lieutenant? "

"Are you saying," Number One interrupted, "all these beings, like Spock, have burst into flame because of their telepathy? What survival mechanism does that serve?" She sounded more doubtful than curious.

"It may be protective," Spock conjectured, looking at the flames dancing on the arms of his blue tunic. "Just as minority groups may adopt seemingly dangerous characteristics, to avoid predation by the majority."

"But this was no voluntary adaptation on your part," Number One said, eternally testing the younger officer.

"Indeed," Spock said, though he also seemed pleased—even amused—by the transformation, at somehow being adopted into a dangerous minority. The flames roared off him like combustion fuel, but gave no actual heat.

All the while, the apparent Talosian, seeming perfectly humanoid in all other respects, stood before them, and the crowds squeezed past, unendingly. And no one seemed to notice the raging fires.

"As long as they remain peaceful," Spock said, with a start, as if understanding had suddenly dawned: "they are tolerated by the rest of the population." Then he turned to Captain Pike again, intrigued, his face shining bright through the fires. "Perhaps one day, 750,000 years ago, they ceased their non-violent behavior, provoking their final war!"

"Somehow," Pike looked away, at all the wealth and stature of a developed civilization, and all of them knowing what would one day come of it, "I can't quite share your enthusiasm, Mr. Spock."

A molten beam, like a tendril or a solar flare, crept out of the native's face, the one they'd been trying to communicate with till now, toward Spock's own forehead. The Vulcan did not flinch, but watched with mild curiosity as the fiery fountain slowly made its way at his own, like a tributary between great rivers, as their cape-like tails of orange and yellow whipped up around them.

"Analysis," Pike demanded, his arm coming up to sweep his officer a few steps back from the approaching flame.

"It doesn't read at all," Number One said, without surprise. As far as their instruments were concerned, not a single fiery raiment around them seemed to exist anywhere outside their visual senses.

"If these are the distant ancestors of the Talosians," Spock said, gently moving the captain's forearm away from his chest, "I suspect their telepathic abilities may still be somewhat less formidable."

"And if you're mistaken, science officer?"

"I may not be any more severe than being split in half, as a child, between two cultures," the Vulcan said, with a challenging little smile.

Pike lowered his arm, sobered by the suggestion of youthful trauma, as Spock stepped toward the fountain of fire. Gradually, it splashed across his own face, too.

"It is a… voluntary stigmatization," the science officer said, as if he were translating a conversation into standard Federation-speak. "To show respect… to the majority… of non-telepaths…"

"Ask him how this can be Talos," Pike muttered, spuriously, looking up as another revolving black starfish descended overhead, swaying against the skyscrapers with its intermittent, flexible arms. As the situation was not yet dire, he could afford to be rueful about the strange reality of it all.

"How can this be Talos?" Spock repeated.

"_It can be anything we wish_," the burning native spoke into Spock's mind, and the Vulcan repeated it, as he heard the words emerge on the shore of his own consciousness, and the flaming stream twisted and wavered between them. "_But we wish to maintain the present structure, for the benefit of our families… for the benefit of our conventional social structure… for the present, we wish it to be as it has always been_."

"Telepaths are a persecuted minority on this world?" Number One seemed suddenly shocked and wary, though not a telepath herself. "Telepathy is the highest form of empathy, on most worlds," she said, as if she would run to the front of the line, to be the first to shake some sense into this whole world.

"And here, it's an object of disgust," Pike concluded, almost abruptly.

"Telepathy may be disgusting, if you're embarrassed about the way your own mind secretly works," the xeno-biologist, quiet till now, said philosophically. The two security men still had their phasers in their hands, on either side of Pike.

"If this burning, if these fires, are a voluntary gesture, to warn non-telepaths," Chris Pike said, speaking first to Spock, and gradually turning to the native, "then why is my science officer burning, too, without his permission?"

"It is… a protection," Spock said, not seeming to put any understanding or color on the short answer, as the flames poured directly against the middle of his face. The dark hair across his forehead seemed to rustle now and then, though it must have been a distortion of the blaze.

"Against his being arrested, or… punished?" Pike said, looking around the crowds that hurried along endlessly, all around. Even the other telepaths, streaking by like meteors in slow-motion, seemed to ignore Spock and the businessman, likewise in flames.

"Arrested by whom," Number One demanded, unwilling to go through some exhausting bureaucratic mess.

"It is not an arrest," Spock translated.

"Social pressure, social stigma, social violence," the xeno-biologist suggested.

"For many centuries," Spock said, trying to concentrate, even as the other crewmen were interjecting, "we were abused, hunted down, and murdered. Then we hit upon a threat display, the fires that would protect us, and also satisfy the majority, by suggesting some inherent, burning evil within."

"And validated their prejudice against you," Pike said, expressionlessly, which was as close to kindness as he usually cared to come.

Now all the others in the _Enterprise _landing party were listening, as if to strangely familiar music, a song of madness in the air.

"So now," Number One said, though it was actually Vina speaking, coming to an awful recognition, "we have to protect the telepaths of Talos IV, to prevent them from one day overcoming their persecutors, destroying them, and going on to capture, and enslave, anyone they can snare with their false maydays."

"From bad to worse," Pike nodded, watching the whipping tails of flame rippling up above his science officer and their burning guide.

"We might be able to change that future, Captain," Number One said, leaning in toward him, for it had suddenly dawned on Vina, inside of her: that her decades of suffering in a cage might never have to happen after all, if they could somehow plan it out, and change the past, through this one keeper's subconscious mind, before the end of this world, and the beginning of their slow extinction. And if she could re-live her own life, by re-shaping all of theirs', perhaps she'd then be free…

"How?" Pike was looking very intently at the flaming telepath. To the captain, changing the broad sweep of history was the subject at hand. But his deeper sympathy, and love, was for Vina. And she stood right next to him, without his knowing.

She was beginning to realize she'd never live long enough to wipe every keeper off the map of space, at her age, in her condition. But this new avenue, into one keeper's cultural continuum, suggested an even more enticing possibility, an attack from behind—750,000 years behind.

She felt a strange new thrill she'd never felt before. She didn't need Spock anymore, if this worked out, to supply Chris to her, in old unrevealed memories, to share him through the bodies of Lt. Freeman, or that walking computer, his first officer. Now she'd save them all, by travelling back through the star-sized brain she crouched over now, in the modern _Enterprise_, in its sickbay. And if she could somehow save the keepers before they went bad, through the doorway into this one, private universe…

After all, Kirk had the Klingons to save him now…

G'vul was writhing, and even twisting like a giant rotisserie chicken, as he hung diagonally from the trusses in the little cabin: his boots hooked to the corner in back, as he tried to free himself in the chaos of battle. Out in the gangway the red alert siren "whooped" again and again. And as far as he was concerned, he had no intention of saving anyone but himself, least of all anyone within the Federation. General Hof had left the cockpit, being of little use in modern battle, and stood against the wall outside now, arms folded, a menacing phaser-rifle folded between his fore-paws, just in case. When the ship shuddered in some sudden change of course, the Tellarite shook with it, but hadn't fallen yet.

Up in the cockpit, Jim Kirk had finally piloted the ship out to the periphery of the battlefront, out beyond the four starships, until they dodged back and forth again and, by then, they'd hopefully have made their big move. Till then, Kirk was trying to decide how to put himself at the weakest point for the two keeper-controlled behemoths out there, racing around with the _Enterprise _and the _Ticonderoga, _like cats circling before a fight.

"How can you get latched on to either one of them," Robert Stamfield said quietly, "when they won't stay still?"

"And how can we keep from getting blasted out of the sky by our own ships?" Kirk spoke the words, but he already seemed to be well beyond the formulation of the question, sending the scout ship right into the midst of the fray, shields up and both men strapped tight in their harnesses.

Finally, it seemed he'd found a way to predict the attack pattern of the _Biruni_, though the new _Defiant _was still a half a light year out of range, with a little-known captain and crew to replace her predecessor, which had been lost in a rift in space a year ago.

There they were, in the main space-lanes between Earth and Rigel. And on the widest magnification, Lt. Stamfield was watching as one private ship after another came sailing through the battle, abruptly changing course as each civilian crew realized the sudden danger ahead, to freighters and transports and private craft. Now and then a small Earth vessel would go zinging right through the phaser blasts and photon torpedo barrage, but so far each one emerged from that bubble of targeted, brilliant explosions and searing light, seemingly unscathed.

More torpedo blasts exploded against the shields of the _Enterprise_, with a flash like the old-style fusion bombs; and veils of light pounded against the crackling barriers as _Enterprise_ turned and fired her phasers in response.

And here they went, in the little spy ship, right into the midst of it themselves, tilting this way and that, diving and climbing, relative to _Biruni_. But she wasn't slowing down for anything, being so engaged in battle with the _Ticonderoga. _ It almost seemed that both ships were nearly more brutal flashes of light than nutronium or nacelles, as if Captain Safeer, and the senior commander on the _Biruni_ had made up their minds that there was no turning back, en route to Earth.

The weapons of the starships sawed brilliantly, back and forth against each other's hull, and they turned to fight again and again, firing as they strafed across each other's path. And the little black ship, just now catching the first stray phaser blasts, swept in closer above _Biruni's _saucer from behind, in the very worst of it, as the _Ticonderoga _went roaring overhead, and they crept across the upper hull of the _Biruni_. If her captain had heard any bump as Kirk tried to match for course and speed, there didn't seem to be any extra punishment, beyond the non-stop pounding of the firepower. The main distraction now was the hailstorm of phaser blasts coming down from _Ticonderoga_, and the whip-saw dizziness of the _Biruni_ careening to evade, diving away from Kirk again and again.

The noise of _Ticonderoga's _attack had become nearly constant now, crashing against their own shields too. He guessed that Captain Safeer must have seen his approach, and was doing everything in her power to distract the other dark starship, which was coming around to fire back, even as _Ticonderoga _spun for another jousting charge, phasers blasting out along all possible paths of escape.

Lt. Stamfield called up a damage report, after two or more sudden, distinct impacts. A hologram of the scout ship appeared above the controls, and Kirk glanced over to see their hull flashing red in one spot, and blue in two others where the shields had just about broken down. They were skimming very slowly toward the armored bubble of the bridge, atop the two decks in the center of the vast saucer section. Jim Kirk popped his harness open, and half rose out of his seat to spot the smooth fittings around the built-in escape pods up ahead through the portals.

Like terrible red lightning, one of _Ticonderoga's _phasers had blasted through _Biruni's_ shields entirely, and they could barely keep from looking as part of the starship's hull shuddered and crackled and partially dissipated off to port.

"We may not get a better distraction than that," Kirk muttered, feeling awful for feeling relieved. He tapped on the controls until he found a dry schematic of the lifeboat mechanisms he was determined to make his point of break-in.

"Hell, blasting through those heat-shields," Kirk muttered, as they drifted up the lower bulge, beneath the bridge. The perfectly flush rectangles around the outside of the bridge were designed to serve as the leading edge of the tiny re-entry capsules, if they could make it to planet-fall after some cataclysmic event on the starship.

Stamfield nodded, and both men tried to concentrate as the _Biruni _beneath themdove across the path of the oncoming _Ticonderoga_, and more phaser spray blinded their view. _Ticonderoga _was sporting a trail of sparks off its forward lip, spreading fire behind her as she passed. She looked enormous as her scanner dish tilted up to the left, and her phasers rained down from the sideways saucer right overhead.

Neither ship could take much more punishment like this, each from their own kind, and Kirk he steered the black scout ship till its largest under-belly hatch was able to clamp down on one of the lifeboats below. Both men had unclipped their harnesses, and when they turned they could see that General Hof was hunkered against the gangway bulkhead, halfway down, phaser-rifle firmly in his grip.

And when Kirk and Stamfield scrambled down, they could see why—G'vul had one arm free, and was dangling with renewed energy, to break out of his shackles altogether. The general did not speak, but it was clear from his lowered brow and bared fangs that he'd made up his mind he had only one task now: to shoot the Klingon the second he freed himself and preferably before he hit the deck.

Kirk glanced back and forth, noting the tension of the Tellarite, glaring into the cabin across the narrow passageway. He bent down to lift a heavy grating above the lower hatch, and Stamfield hauled that patch of metal away against the wall, as the captain leaned down into the underpinnings of the ship.

The hull of the _Biruni _seemed perfectly normal when he popped the hatch: though still blackened by Protocol Eight, this little section of the central tower was smooth and unblemished by the battle going on all around. He reached down with a tricorder, adjusting to simulate an evacuation signal.

He thought he heard a sudden _hiss _of air pressure flowing into the lifeboat below, but it could have just been the distant echo of another phaser blast, striking against the saucer.

He hoisted himself back up into the scout ship, and made a sort of magician's theatrical gesture, as if a beautiful woman were about to burst up through the gangway. Nothing happened, and Robert Stamfield tried to suppress a smile.

Then, big as pair of control consoles, piled one on top of the other, the lifeboat slid up into their cargo bay, clanging into the grates under Stamfield's boots. Kirk pulled himself up, and climbed across the top of the escape pod. Then, standing before the Klingon's make-shift cell, he unfastened his phaser from his belt.

"Time to go," the captain said, without any trace of amusement. General Hof was right behind him, holding the rifle like a hussar on parade, as G'vul gradually stopped writhing in his remaining restraints, trying to guess Kirk's next move.

When he approached, however, the Klingon took a wide swing at him with his free arm, perhaps out of pure psychological warfare. The captain raised his phaser to show he wasn't kidding around.

"You can't see them without me, Earther," the Klingon warned, a sharp-toothed grin spreading across his face as he hung there, otherwise powerless.

"You're a big boy," Kirk nodded, as G'vul hung there like a butcher's goose. "I'm sure we'd only waste… a few minutes if I have to drag you down there, half-dead."

"By that time you'll have lost at least one of your mightiest ships," G'vul taunted him.

"And then we won't need you," the captain whispered, right into his dark bronze ear, all the humanity drained from his face. Suddenly he was that feral Kirk, from out of the shadows, the one he always kept in hiding. They stood there for a moment, both of them just smelling bilge water, from the previous occupant: worse than the smell of rot.

When Hof and Stamfield came in, G'vul came down without a problem.


	11. Chapters 20 and 21 (Conclusion)

**Chapter Twenty **

"But don't you see?" The impassioned words were pouring out of Number One's mouth, but it was Vina who spoke so forcefully from within. "If you allow them to crush you, to make you so vastly different from them, it will only make them right: and you will be different, and you will be less than them! You'll become something 'wrong,' in their eyes, until their cruelty, and your inevitable hatred of yourselves, turns you _and_ them into something that's totally evil!"

Neither Pike, nor the young Spock, could argue with what she was saying, though the crowd around them remained very still—except for those flames. The room full of human bonfires, of witches burning without their stakes, was silent—and the ghostly light that burned off them endlessly threw vague, flame-like shadows against the walls of a dark basement room beneath an empty skyscraper. The feeling of being trapped in a burning building was becoming inescapable.

But she wasn't getting through—these earliest, despised telepaths of Talos IV seemed filled with despair, resigned to be squeezed into the tightest margins of their own society, out of sheer contrariness, or perhaps even a sense of superiority. And now their silence, their disbelief at her urging, suggested they'd given up any hope of ever even considering themselves "normal."

Or, they somehow saw beneath the mask of Number One, down into the real speaker, Vina herself, and found her timid, or conformist, or perhaps just not as daring, in her disguise.

"_Many of us,_" one of the burning women said, stepping forward, "_were abandoned as children, to strangers, to our fellow telepaths: left on doorsteps, or killed in our early youth, or hounded to death growing up, by the endless hatred we read in the minds of others—even the hatred of our own families._"

Against her will, Vina could see the faces of grim telepaths, finally drowning themselves, poisoning themselves, blasting themselves out of existence, or even throwing themselves off buildings… just as Vina would throw their last generation off buildings, three quarter's of a million years later—or, rather, their vastly transformed and twisted descendants, who'd come to make a cult out of their own persecution. The sudden realization of similarity, even between these innocents in their youth, and the wickedness of the keepers to come, was more and more unsettling.

_"We knew our families, our countrymen, too well, from their thoughts. And we grew up too quickly in that knowledge. They found our talent for intimacy… unflattering._" This almost sounded like a joke, but there was no sign of amusement on any of their faces, behind their fiery veils. A wave of bitterness swept through the room, and the rising tails of flame all shifted around, as if suddenly whipped by a powerful weather front.

"Look in to my own mind," she said, at last, as though giving herself to them with complete trust. Number One stepped down from the chair Pike had stood on used earlier, to introduce the landing party. He certainly couldn't explain how they got there, but at least he tried to develop some rapport.

"We come from many cultures, many planets," she said, Vina remembering many such speeches Pike himself had given, in their shared dreams—and now she tried to make the familiar old speech sound relevant to these people, who had seen the worst of their own kind, before a great hardness of hearts, and the most literal closed-mindedness, destroyed their world.

Number One/Vina reached into the flames of one Talosian after another, three quarter's of a million years or more before they'd become the keepers she despised. She clasped their folded arms, touched their upraised shoulders, and looked into their desolate eyes, behind the cool, endless fire. And one by one, she felt them looking through her eyes, as if travelling inside, crawling the long path of her optic nerve, deep into her brain, beyond that of the navigator of the _Enterprise_, and into its present day patient's own mind, as deep as one could go.

Captain Pike watched, ready to pull her away from the growing circle of fires crowding in around them. It was easily one of the strangest alien encounters he'd seen in his decades in Starfleet.

"The fear and distrust of all the others, outside, turning to hatred and cruelty…" Number One insisted, as Pike gently led her out through the fires. "And an innocent love, turning to a desperate one, turning to disdain, and vengeance against those who lacked the power."

"That's enough," Pike nodded quietly.

Tears were streaming down her hardened face as she broke away, and the landing party climbed back to the surface. Mr. Spock's own fiery visage gradually returned to normal, and they resumed their hexagonal beaming formation up on the quiet sidewalk in the dark. It was a Talos, by night, that still had many proud empty buildings, and many proud, shuttered people. But already it seemed as ruined as the one they knew too well.

Vina awoke to the sound of Spock and the doctor having a rapid-fire discussion. Nurse Chapel helped her up, and across the sickbay ward to her own bed.

"There is no longer any need to maintain the fiction!" The Vulcan was looking down at the deck, as he paced away from the keeper's bed.

"But how am I supposed to keep it under control, to protect the ship, when I don't even know the basic anatomical principles!"

"That, Doctor, has never stopped you before."

Vina opened her eyes to see the Vulcan turning to leave, looking quite self-possessed. But Dr. McCoy was seething with anger. The keeper on the bed was still alive, but motionless.

"Scotty can keep us in one piece till Jim gets back!"

Spock paused, formulating his reasoned response.

"But the captain cannot be on both the _Biruni _and the _Defiant _at the same time. And, as long as the battle continues, our entire fleet is at risk." Spock turned to the bored-looking Klingon, seated at the end of the row of beds. "Mr. K'Toinne, please come with me," he said, and his brusque manner carried with it the complete conviction that the young prisoner would instantly rise and follow, which (of course) he did.

Mr. Kyle was back where he belonged: in the transporter room, calibrating the entangled-particle generators, while the entire room thrummed with energy. Spock and the young Klingon came in as the door snapped open.

"Set coordinates for the bridge of the _Defiant_, Mr. Kyle," the first officer said flatly, as K'Toinne followed him up on the pads.

"Most of their shields are still up, Mr. Spock!"

"Beam us in at the weakest point, then," the Vulcan answered quickly. "We shall work our way up to the bridge from there."

"Aye, sir," the transporter chief sighed, studying the big scanner in the center of his console, tapping lighted pads with his right hand, but then paused awkwardly. A brief moment passed, as if he were watching for a clay pigeon to go flying up in the air before he pulled the trigger. With a quicker-than-usual sliding motion, Kyle pushed the beaming modulators all the way up, as another torpedo exploded against their own shields.

Looking up, a moment later, Spock could instantly see why this was the best place to enter the _Defiant_: the empty dorm room for ensigns had obviously been hit from the outside with a barrage of fire, and all the bunk beds were thrown up against the inner bulkhead. They climbed over the wreckage to the door, which still opened as if nothing at all were wrong.

He held the slender Klingon back for a moment, watching as a repair crew raced by to some even worse damage. The two went the opposite direction, as another group of men in radiation vests raced past.

"They didn't even notice," K'Toinne said, not knowing whether to feel offended or relieved.

"They may be operating under some mass delusion," Spock said, and they turned again to find the nearest lift. "Perhaps they are so consumed with events that an actual Klingon, on the periphery, would scarcely qualify as a passing distraction." With a firm twist of the grab-handle, Spock sent the lift forward in the neck, away from the impulse engines, and hurtling up through the ship.

"What am I supposed to do?" K'Toinne muttered, sounding out of breath as they shot upward in the enclosed little space. "Jump out and shout, 'look everybody—I'm a Klingon?'"

"That may not be necessary, as the command crew will likely already be in a state of high alert."

"I don't mind telling you, that doesn't fill me with confidence," K'Toinne shook his head, seeing as how everyone but him seemed to be carrying a phaser on this ship.

But it was too late, and the lift opened up on the bridge of the new _Defiant_.

K'Toinne stepped out, as quietly as possible: eyes suddenly wild with anxiety as he stood under the grating above the lift entryway, and between the red alert flashers. Spock, behind him, could see the two security guards turn with a start, and step forward to grab the Klingon. But the Vulcan's hands shot out and pinched each of their necks, sending them down to the deck in two heaps.

Just as he had on the bridge of the _Enterprise_, K'Toinne stepped forward, a bit closer to the captain's chair, where a commander in a gold tunic was leaning forward. Up on the main viewscreen, they could see the _Enterprise _exchanging fire with them, in a dead-on, point-blank shootout. It was horrific, like the Old Testament Midianites, slashing away at their own fellow soldiers in the darkness and confusion. And any other Klingon would have laughed out loud.

And so, K'Toinne did what any of his brothers, or uncles, or fellow Klingons would have done. That was his job, after all, till one of these madmen killed him, he supposed. And every head turned toward him, one by one, as he roared and raised his arms in his best facsimile of a very big, gloating belly-laugh.

"Security to the bridge!" the man in the yellow tunic shouted from the center seat. Spock had already guessed it was the lead navigator in temporary command, from the way his fingers had tapped on his black trousers, in harmony with the man at the helm, as _Defiant _warped out for more maneuvering room.

Spock gave K'Toinne another shove ahead, looking over the Klingon's shoulder, to the left and the right, as if a keeper might suddenly become visible on one side or another. There were only about twenty or thirty seconds before red-shirts came pouring out behind them, and the two stumbled down the steps to the center seat.

Now running short on time, the _Enterprise_ first officer reached out and grabbed the Klingon, hoisting him up in the air like a lantern with one hand, to see the enemy of the Federation. The real enemy. Back and forth. In his other hand, his phaser pistol followed the arc. Back and forth.

"You're Commander Spock!" the man in the center seat gasped, as if this were even stranger than the sight of a Klingon on the bridge. It must have seemed a like partnership directly out of Hell. And behind these invaders, the engineering officer rose and quietly crept toward the Vulcan from behind. The _Defiant's _commanding officer tried to catch Spock's dark and hawk-like stare, as Spock studied each square meter of the bridge, and the helmsman resumed his blinding attack on the flagship of the fleet.

"This ship is under the control of a hostile alien telepath," Spock said, over the din of the instrumentation, and the thunder of the weaponry. "We have come on board to isolate the invader, and restore the _Defiant _to Federation control."

"That's outrageous!" It was the man in the yellow tunic, who would later be identified as Commander Murray.

Spock turned to face the temporary commander, having worked his way back near his point of entry, still holding K'Toinne up like a barbarian's trophy: an enemy's severed head, perhaps. K'Toinne, for his part, tried to laugh again, but only halting little gasps escaped his lips, more in desperation than scorn.

"Oh my god!" It was the engineering officer, whose face had gone quite pale all of a sudden. He had been filled with rage at the sight of the Klingon, and then at the notion that an _Enterprise _officer would attempt to board his ship in battle, after all they'd been through because of them (which, in a very broad sense, was the truth). And now he peered between the two non-humans, up toward a spot across the bridge, to the recessed lighting in the dome just past the viewscreen.

"There's something up there," he said, filled with disbelief, even though a silvery form scrambled to hide farther back in the lip above the wide science console and its overhead display screens.

The red turbolift doors split open with the usual _hiss_! and five giant security men shoved their way out onto the bridge.

"Hold," the Commander Murray said. And all those red-shirts stopped, just to Spock's right, looking astonished at the Klingon held out in mid-air, in Spock's iron grasp. Like a magnifying glass, or a telescope, the Vulcan obligingly stepped in front of the guards, so they could look across to see what everyone else was now peering up at.

Automatically, like one many-armed machine, all their phasers came up at once, till the weapons were all pointing under or over Spock's upraised arm, and all around the Klingon. K'Toinne turned this way and that, up in the air, looking extremely alarmed at being caught in the middle. His feet sort of pedaled in the air, half-heartedly.

Jim Kirk had never been quite so close to a Klingon before, except in a fistfight or two.

The escape pod was designed to hold one humanoid for up to two weeks, but G'vul was the size of one-and-a-half humanoids, and Kirk was right in there, crouched on top of him. Robert Stamfield closed the hatch from up in the scout ship with a worried look, waiting to take his turn next.

And, smashed together like that, the phaser against the Klingon's chest would have disabled them both, if Kirk had to use it—worse than that, if he did pull the trigger, it was almost certain that G'vul would revive first, and kill him on the spot. The escape pod _hissed _down into the bridge of the _Biruni_, and the captain kept a mad look on his face, to show he was beyond reason or doubt, himself.

He blew the bottom hatch, and the viewscreen over the environmental station came crashing down below them. The two adversaries tumbled down across the computer panel, and out onto the bridge of the starship. It was clearly the last thing anyone on the _Biruni _ever expected to see, and they all stood in astonishment, as Kirk raised the phaser up into the Klingon's face, there on the upper command circle.

The escape pod rose again, like a little elevator, and a few moments later Stamfield and the Tellarite came tumbling down too. The lieutenant was able to steady himself on the frame of the hatch, and jump down from the control panel, but General Hof immediately fell down on top of the first two, and G'vul took his only chance.

"Security to the bridge, on the double!" the commander of the _Biruni_ shouted.

G'vul was twisting the phaser pistol in Kirk's hand, toward the human's own chest, and General Hof was struggling to get to his feet, even as the two beneath him were writhing back and forth.

The lift doors blew open, behind the center seat, and five or six security men (it was impossible to tell, they moved as one, so quickly) sprang out onto the bridge, and then Kirk's phaser went off, and the big Klingon was thrown back, but he landed with General Hof, who had been trying to grab the weapon too.

And as the five or six red-shirts, and the _Biruni_'s science officer all ran to stop the chaotic fight, and the security chief was yelling at G'vul to stop, and Stamfield was helping Kirk up, G'vul grabbed onto General Hof's collarbone, and simply tore downward, with his bare hand, down through the Tellarite's chest, ripping open his colorful plastic uniform, and the hair and skin beneath that, and the bones in his ribcage, and the organs below that, all in one horrific plunging gesture downward, and then Kirk saw the keeper.

His face stretched long with surprise, and he fired once, and the keeper went down like a marionette without its strings. And with another shot, the Klingon vanished suddenly in a blinding silhouette of light. And then, everything was just horribly quiet, till he could begin to hear the computer chatter in the background.

"No… such… thing…" the general seemed to gasp, lying in his own reddish-brown blood.

"What did he say?" Stamfield seemed amazed the Tellarite could speak at all, as the crew of the _Biruni _gathered around now. Over Kirk's shoulder, on the viewscreen, the space battle had stopped, almost immediately. The _Enterprise _just floated there, as the blood spread around Jim Kirk's boots.

"No such thing," Kirk replied, shaking his head. As in, _No such thing as victory_.

A thousand years later, an emergency medical crew was up on _Biruni's_ bridge, hovering over the Tellarite, with two doctors and two nurses, who eventually maneuvered the general's body into the turbolift, with two members of the security team. At the other end of the bridge, Kirk and two of the red shirts had taken off their tunics, and wiped up the blood with them, as if that would make it so nothing had happened. Another security man scooped up the motionless Talosian under his arm, and gradually all the emergency officers left the bridge.

**CAPTAIN'S LOG Stardate 2311.51 ****_En route to an official investigation at Vulcan Space Control, after a stop along the way at Tellar. _**_All four ships are under repair, with their captains and first officers returned to command, freed from induced sleep in sickbay or from where they were held in their brigs, by the keepers. For heroic service, we are fulfilling a pledge to transfer a Federation scout vessel to a Klingon, K'Toinne, the former captive. _

It had been almost twenty-four hours since Jim Kirk requested permission to turn the scout ship over to K'Toinne, after installing a new set of self-defense programs on it, limiting weapons access. And now, at last, the reedy young Klingon walked around the black vessel with its first captain.

"I don't know, really," K'Toinne sighed, when Kirk asked him of his plans. "Try not to crash into a star, first of all," he smiled.

"You'll do fine," Kirk nodded, and K'Toinne climbed up into the ship, all by himself, for the first time.

"Stay the bugger away from Talos IV, I know that," the Klingon laughed. Kirk nodded again, from down on the shuttle bay deck, looking up at the proud young fellow, at the top of the little staircase, as if each of them were still trying to figure it all out.

"Talos IV will have to try to stay away from you!" Kirk smiled, and they each gave a little nodding salute, before the hatch closed. He hurried back to the airlock, before the great hanger doors began to part. The scout ship rose gracefully—automatically, of course—and tipped out into space. Jim Kirk could hear the rumble through the lower hull of the _Enterprise_, as those massive doors rolled closed again.

"I don't know, Jim," McCoy shook his head, in their own sickbay on board the USS _Enterprise_. He'd seen this same head-shaking a thousand times before so, of course, Jim Kirk thought nothing of it. They looked down on the body of the Tellarite, beamed directly from sickbay on the _Biruni,_ and at the mass of hoses and tubes and the breathing mask and the added monitors and the tape all over him, as he lay on one of the beds in the wardroom, unconscious. Air pumped into his ruined lungs through a mask, and it almost seemed the only life in him came from the crowded mass of machines all around him, from the invisible life-force of the _Enterprise _itself. In three days, they'd be at Hof's home world, for better or worse.

"Maybe their own doctors…" Kirk ventured, not really intending to rile the surgeon.

"On Tellar? You've got to be kidding," McCoy scowled. "I wouldn't leave a sick cat under a bed down there."

"Well," Kirk sighed (which angered McCoy even more), "at least he'll get a hero's burial."

"Shut the hell up and get the hell out of my sickbay," the doctor shouted, clearly exhausted after finishing the patch job on Hof so completely, over the last three hours. McCoy's eyes were menacing. And still, the general looked as though he'd been through a terrible crash landing. The way Vina must have looked, when the keepers first pulled her from the wreckage on Talos.

"What about her?" Kirk asked, as they half-turned toward the beautiful blond, huddling over that sleeping keeper a few beds away. It almost seemed that her own life-force was being poured into keeping it alive, too—returning the favor, perhaps.

"She said the strangest thing," McCoy looked up at the struts overhead, in the ceiling, as he rubbed his weary neck. "'If I can save them, just one of them, from the birth of their own evil, I think I can save them all.'" He tossed his eyebrows at the strange turn of her feelings toward her captors.

"I… doubt Starfleet would agree to that particular brand of diplomacy, Bones," Kirk said, very quietly. He walked over and leaned against the bed, behind her where she knelt. But, if she knew he was there, she was too consumed by her own efforts to live in the keeper's own dreams, for a change. She looked strangely frustrated, crouched there by the pillow, above the giant throbbing head. Or, perhaps she was just having trouble, confronting her new view of her old captors.

He watched her, beautiful again in a simple white Starfleet jumpsuit, squandering all that beauty on a frail little being that didn't seem to know she was there. Its arteries still seemed to be working in slow motion, as it lay with eyes closed, and mouth slightly opened. She never looked up.

But then, perhaps, she did. As he watched her, auditing the its deepest memories, she also seemed to be speaking with Kirk, gently, face to face, in… somewhere else. It wasn't in the dark, as the man in the yellow tuxedo waited to close his frontier cafe on Saldana, and it wasn't one of those awful goodbye scenes, where the girl speaks to the boy through a huge Starfleet viewscreen, in front of all of his co-workers. It was just the two of them, at some barrier, like the edge of the galaxy where once their vessels could not go.

"I know I can do it, Captain," Vina said, and they were face to face, in a way that was unsettlingly personal to him.

"You can do a lot of things, but why this?"

She looked at him kindly, through her practiced beauty, not in sickbay, but not quite anywhere else. She had none of the geological accretion of her long-standing rage and deprivation, and even tried to smile.

"They had a power, and it could have been used so beautifully, and wisely. If people hadn't been so afraid," she said, looking past him now, at some other abstract horizon, beyond this galaxy's edge.

"And you… intend to piece together something good, out of what they were," Kirk said, as mildly, as pleasantly, as constructively as he could, beyond all reason.

"There are the briefest moments of hope. We forge them into links, and make a chain. Even if we have to pound on them till they break a thousand times, screaming on the forge," she said, smiling at her own dramatic struggles. "It only makes hope stronger."

"Since you've been gone, there are machines to forge our chains, and pills to calm the nerves," Kirk said, as if it were a matter beneath her concern.

"There really are no pills for dreams, Captain Kirk. They tell you so, but they're wrong. Not even for most memories. They always come back, or bend us around them, too severely. And still, they're as real as any cage, or any freedom," she said. And now she really was smiling a bit, starting over for the one millionth time. Only now, she was huddled over the powerless cause of it all, or the end of it all.

At his request, all four of the starships were allowed to stop off at Tellar, on their way to the inquest on Vulcan. It would transform the pending transfer of the general into a spectacular affair, or at least a mechanical wonder, if only Hof could live to see it. Three days later, and he still wasn't conscious. And though about half the hoses and tubes had been removed from his great hairy chest, six or seven still remained, running off into tanks in the bulkhead behind his head.

He certainly wasn't ready to go charging up to some platform to make a speech like a returning hero, Kirk thought, putting that idea away, as he slowly folded his legs in the captain's chair: back on his own bridge at last, imagining Hof's even more delayed return. If anyone even cared, anymore.

Tellar was before them now, and all their ships were light like silver, above the green and rocky world. He was thinking in the heavy measure of poetical verse, so he realized Mr. Spock must have silently crept up by the side of his chair, also watching. Now he knew, it was the price he paid for being around a telepath. Or the price Spock paid for being around him.

"They are a most… chaotic people," Spock said, looking out at the planet of the piggy-snouted men, as they approached. "If our own logic and reason hadn't guided us, as we first reached out into space from Vulcan, we might have ended our explorations immediately upon encountering them, and just kept to ourselves, hundreds of your Earth years ago."

"You don't get to choose your neighbors, Mr. Spock," Kirk said, feeling sorry for both Vulcan and Tellar at once.

"Indeed not," the Vulcan nodded.

"Well, then, I suppose you'll want to stay up here."

"And miss the mad, collective howl of a billion Tellarites?" Spock shook his head in amazement, as if it might be the most horrific space-wreck of all time. "As you Earth-men are so fond of saying, 'I would not miss it for my world,' Captain."

Another yeoman came and presented a wedge-pad for his signature, and he pretended to examine it closely, as he considered the coming adventure. She was quite a beauty, standing there. Then, something on the writing screen caught his eye, and he began reading.

"Entering standard orbit, Captain," Mr. Chekov announced, as Mr. Sulu, to his left, seemed to be watching the other starships in their formidable ranks behind them.

"Very good, gentlemen," Kirk sighed, signing the wedge-pad, and receiving a nice little nod from the girl in the mini-skirt, as she went back below deck once more. After a respectful minute, he got back out of his chair, and Spock followed him to the red lift doors. It was time to put on fancy gold braid and satin once again.

A short while later, he stood waiting in the transporter room with Spock, similarly attired in his own ceremonial blue, with about half of all his medals and bars on one side. It was a personal choice, these days, in such diplomatic events, picking the honorifics that seemed to suit the moment: this particular little medallion; that nearly-forgotten ribbon. Like a recipe of amulets, against a horde of stormy bears.

Dr. McCoy appeared in the transporter room doorway, with its extra-thick walls, and paused to admire them both, and the miracle of their survival, under the sheer weight of all that gold and silver.

"He's not ready to go, yet, Jim," the surgeon confided, as if warning a nervous groom.

"Well, we'll go ourselves, and… prepare the welcome, then. Come on, Spock," Kirk nodded gamely, and climbed up onto the foremost round lens.

"How long do you suppose the other ships will be allowed to wait in orbit?" Spock said, as he passed Kirk to take up a position on his right.

"They can use the time to make repairs, just like us," Kirk said, nodding to the transporter specialist on duty, and the comforting chamber dissolved like golden scarabs all around.

McCoy just stood there and stared disapprovingly for a minute, at the medical impracticality of it all, and the young lady at the controls just smiled, as if he were being old fashioned. He wisely left without pursuing the matter.

They beamed into a Starfleet office, on what seemed to be the local version of an "embassy row," with flags of other planets waving in the breeze along the street outside. If he'd been hit in the head, though, he might have thought (for just a second) that he was in some great deep forest, instead of a city.

The buildings were tall and haughty, of course, making you want to know the architect's name right away. But the prevailing theme in every surface seemed to be dark and winding tree trunks, with windows woven all throughout the sinewy wood-like textures, glittering up to the sky. He half expected to see aircars that looked like spawning salmon, jumping up between them, and some great bear-god snatching them up in currents of the sky.

But the aircars were just aircars, and there was no great bear-god that he could see up there. And down on the street, just the usual Tellar cacophony of hairy, shouting men in mezzanines and at food stands on the corners, and glossy-coated, fanged women calling after little Tellarite children, who were playing and practicing at being ferocious among themselves in a nearby park.

And now they had to find the particular office of the particular historian of the particular branch of the particular service, which had required so much of a long-lost General Hof. There were no dog-tags to go by, no serial number of a weapon found after battle, or integrated chip, or folded piece of paper in a bloodied pair of trousers. Just a name and a certain military attitude and bearing, which was somehow supposed to unlock a vault of great historical importance.

"No, I'm afraid I don't have any record of a General… Hof, was it?" The kindly little Tellarite record-keeper looked up from behind little round spectacles, like a character in a children's book. He almost imagined her saying, "just forget about the whole thing, dear, and go to sleep now."

"But—I understand, if he's been gone, or absent, for many years," Kirk said, not wishing to wear out his welcome, and doing his best impression of himself being charming and even flirting a bit with the… lady? "He must be in there, somewhere."

"You know," she said, kindly, perhaps smiling in her own ursine way, a way he'd now grown used to, "we've had thousands and thousands of generals. It's possible he served before the records were merged, and perhaps his papers got lost. Or perhaps there was some sort of emotional mis-filing, as we say on this world."

"Please excuse me for asking, but… emotional mis-filing?" Spock finally spoke up, also very respectfully.

"Yes, it's more of a sociological phenomenon, really. It has to do with the warring mind, putting things together in all the wrong ways," she said, very comfortingly, as if the Vulcan were perhaps not as naturally bright about these things as the Tellar.

"So, he _might _have existed, he _might _have actually been a warrior, and even had great—even had _a _great victory, or possibly even _two _great victories—" Jim Kirk began to feel like he was bargaining on Judgment Day.

"Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves," the nice record-keeper said, looking down at her glowing documents again. She deftly riffled through holographic stacks of paper floating above her desk, and tiny, glowing boxes and reams and whole miniature representations of storage shelves of paperwork, being thrown this way and that above the desk, doll-sized storehouses, thrown this way and that by the flick of her surprisingly busy paws. It really was like something out of A.A. Milne, or Lewis Carroll, if those men could have believed in holograms.

This way and that the little images of boxes and papers flew, and she never missed a single one, floating tiny around her desk, like little glowing parcel-shaped planets orbiting her pink little snout, the important titles and vital statistics reflected as they streamed past her glasses. Kirk was afraid to interrupt her again, as her concentration had become so complete.

So they just stood there, and finally wandered off to a window, and gazed across Tellar: a planet full of brutish, posturing, hairy humanoids, with great snouts and great bellies and great yellowy fangs, who'd managed to become great in spite of themselves: like any other planet, really; and it made him wonder if they had their own barnyard or forest animals, that were of a lower order, which looked a bit like him. If they did, though, the general had been too kind to say so.

They were supposed to be at a welcoming lunch soon, but this looked like it was going to go on and on. Neither commander wanted to leave and miss some unexpected bit of information, even if it didn't seem to lead directly to some boar-like glory. And there they were, in their fancy tunics, in their own glory, as the record-keeper plowed through those glowing boxes at her desk.

Now and then, an assistant or a supervisor poked his nose into the room, glanced at the two men from the _Enterprise_, and then hurried away. It only reminded Jim Kirk of all the work left to do, and all the keepers that must still be lurking out there, and the embargoes that must be clamping down between worlds at every point along Federation space. And here he was, pursuing some grain of truth behind the mad dreams of one possible old fool, who survived it all before them.

Maybe it was only the growling, snarling madmen who could survive, and the women, like Vina, who clung to love beyond all reason. As it ever was, he told himself, feeling cold all of a sudden. And, finally, they had to excuse themselves, and go to that reception in their honor.

There, the bears were indeed catching their salmon, Kirk thought, though he hoped it wasn't rude.

Great heaps of food of every carnivorous delight was piled high on trays on long tables, and everywhere there were plastic-looking suits, with great patches of color, and glittering ribbon holding it all together, over fur, and beneath furry jowls, and above furry paws that shuffled or gesticulated wildly, and in Kirk's face, and in Spock's face, occasionally, too: at least sixty of them, all talking at once, louder and louder.

There might have been a little historical reserve between the Tellarites and the Vulcans, a little standoffishness between the natural and the cerebral, but their hosts were too polite to reject or ignore his first officer completely. It's just that they seemed more eager to make a fuss over Kirk, and impress him with their own great tales of one another's valor and sacrifice.

Of course, after a while, Kirk even found himself scratching and boasting like all the others, and roaring a little too loud with a kind of laughter that was almost a stranger to him. And all that food: coming by tray after tray, held by (he supposed) girl Tellarites, batting their eyes in a flattering way.

It was only by glancing occasionally at his first officer that he realized he might be having a little too much fun, but he couldn't fall back into coldness, or be unappreciative in any way, with the entire union of planets unraveling all at once. All the other starship captains were up in orbit, tending to their ships, and here he was, getting stuffed and drunk and hoping someone had heard of his friend from Talos IV.

"General… Hof? No, not that I recall," said one officer after another, one old bear after another. It was really getting painful, that kindly searching look they gave, gazing forgetfully up into the antler chandeliers, up along the carefully designed rough-hewn beams, in a ballroom where they must have danced from time to time. As if perhaps Hof's portrait might have got lost up there or, as they grew a little bit weary of his questioning, as if yet another keeper might possibly have led Jim Kirk astray, and might be waiting to be spotted, hiding up in the wood carving up there, tormenting the poor human.

"But he saved my life, he saved the _Enterprise_ and _Biruni_; he stood by me when a mad mob came to kill me—" that last part, from the recycling vats on Saldana, was at least _partially _true.

"Really?" One Tellarite after another turned to listen to Kirk's exasperated case.

"He was ripped open by a Klingon the size of three of you, and yet he lives!" Kirk said, seizing his opportunity, as a crowd began to form around him, strategically building the story as he went. And Mr. Spock was being edged out, ever so gradually, as the hairy dignitaries pressed-in closer.

"He took one of those powerful telepaths by the throat, to kill it with his bare—hands—" he didn't want to use the wrong word and, well, alienate anyone. But he re-enacted that moment in sickbay, when the keeper had seemed to gain control again, and Hof responded by strangling it on its exam bed.

"And before that, he survived for many—many—years in the cold and filth of a desperate, dangerous world—dreaming of you: his compatriots, of his comrades, of his kind. He never forgot you. He _never _forgot you." Kirk needn't have looked disapprovingly, for the generals and statesmen all around had all fallen silent, and were beginning to snuffle and drool their mouth tears, and nose tears, in abject shame. The whole room had gone still, and he thought he could still hear his words echoing back to him, across their hairy heads.

With perfect timing, Spock raised a frosted glass over their heads, and spoke solemnly.

"A toast: to General Hof!"

"To General Hof!" the entire crowd exploded together, their glasses chiming in mid-air. Even the Vulcan drank.

And again, a toast to Captain Kirk. And to the brave people of Tellar, and to the good… woman? who was still combing the records for some trace of Hof's existence. And on and on. The toasts became longer and more meandering, while the drinks came faster and faster, and no toast was too long, and no drink could be too strong, after the first two or three.

It was a miracle Spock got him back to the ship on two legs.

"Well, now what?" Why was McCoy so loud, the next morning?

"You said he was awake—" Kirk looked confused, sitting across from the doctor, in his sickbay office.

"I said he regained consciousness," the doctor snapped, or it seemed to Kirk that morning-after. It may have just been the hangover, and McCoy's own exhaustion and irritation. Or, was there another keeper on board already?

"Look, Bones, I can't go down there and fire them up like that again, and—" His voice dropped to an even quieter tone now, as his head was pounding in the office outside the wardroom, "I can't send him down there a forgotten man. I owe him more than that!"

"Well, medically, I'd say you couldn't even stand another 'luncheon' like that yourself, even at your age," McCoy said, sarcastically. Random bits of dust were settling on Kirk's warm face, and he brushed them away, annoyed.

"How… conscious… is he," Kirk said, trying to boil it down to just a modest ordeal.

"Give me another week, and I can have him sitting up and taking small amounts of food."

"I'm giving you till tonight." Why did he have to bargain like this, on his own ship?

"Then he's dead, Jim!" So loud. How could a hangover be worse than telepathy? Kirk made his final pitch.

"I want a big… welcoming ceremony—I want torches, in the night: for miles. And slave girls, and wild animals split open by old men in robes—while the young girls scream and get spattered with blood. I want banners, and fireworks, and speeches, and crying in the speeches, and endless roaring, like the end of the world, Bones. And you're putting him up there, on the altar! Tonight. Even if it _does_ kill him."

"Which, it probably _will_," McCoy said, through gritted teeth.

"Which it probably _should_," Kirk said, at last, quietly, resignedly, sadly. He knew he'd raised the stakes to impossible heights. Why was everyone at the absolute end of their rope all the time, now?

There was nothing for the chief medical officer to do, but fold. And finally, the captain felt like he was on top of this stupid headache. They got up from McCoy's little desk, and Kirk followed him back into the next room. General Hof was looking completely dead, although the heart monitor above him quietly insisted otherwise.

All of this, Kirk realized, all McCoy's life-saving magic, just to get him up on a stand, to be roared at by endless crowds, chanting his name, until the mind-bending stress of glory just finished him off, and he collapsed in a heap, finally at the center of all the adulation he'd imagined, for all those years, and he'd die with his dreams come true. The captain shook his head, for it was certainly the long-way 'round to glory.

They brought him halfway across the galaxy, from starvation and wretchedness to (what he hoped would be) the height of Tellar's exaltation. And then he'd die. And that would be the icing on the cake, and Kirk could come and visit his statue in a park some distant day, when none of this mattered anymore, to anyone but him.

Dead. He really just looked dead, with his mouth hanging open, and a tube running in, though perhaps there were a few less tubes, overall.

McCoy was looking at him witheringly, as if waiting for the ridiculous order to magically revive him, somehow.

Then, the strangest thing happened—Vina slid out between the beds behind them, from where she'd been kneeling for a day and a half, and bent over the Tellarite. Her other hand reached out toward the keeper, its head still locked in the brainwave field, like a big round prisoner in a tiny, tiny brig.

A gasp, and a shiver, shook the general as she hovered over him.

"Bones!" Kirk wasn't sure he'd seen it, himself.

"Our guest of honor is late," Lucille Safeer said to Jim Kirk, amidst the line of dignitaries waiting to go up on the big platform, out on the rolling hills beyond the city, as the green sun disappeared beyond the west.

"It's his prerogative, Captain," he replied. And thus began the most elaborate mercy killing known to men.

The word had gone about, and it seemed that tens of thousands of loud, hairy people had poured out of the city to join in the celebration of the return of the mysterious General Hof, who bravely survived the coming attacks already. Many torches, set out to mark the different acres of the fields, were raised and lowered by groups of citizens in the dark till it appeared the hills themselves were undulating out there, with no other reference in the dark. And the masses of Tellarites, stretching as far as Kirk could perceive, were standing or sitting or raising their arms, as it pleased them.

"We have to start," one of the brash piggy-men said, laying a great furry paw on Kirk's shoulder, and the captain could only nod in agreement, as it was growing late.

The first speaker sought to list all the different groups in the crowd, encouraging everyone to applaud for the elderly, or the children, or the halt or the lame, as if the general himself might shortly arrive to lay hands upon them all. The next speaker after that tried to bring them all together with patriotic songs. Neither strategy seemed to work terribly well, as the roar of the crowd, the talking and shouting, always seemed to drown-out any singing or applause for any group that was being acknowledged for its loyal participation.

It didn't look like they'd ever run out of willing speakers, though, waiting for the arrival of the great hero. The next one recounted as much of Kirk's story as he could remember, and the one after that just made things up that seemed to fit with what the fellow before him had tried to piece together. He was actually the most inspiring, Kirk thought.

And so it went, with each speaker adding a little more about heroism, or a dash more violence to the account, and a heavy dollop of sentimentality for all the brave Tellarites who'd gone before him, into the unknown, and all the lost pilots, and all their own forgotten, fallen soldiers, who died in mud and blood and utter obscurity. It almost didn't matter who they were talking about, anymore—no one being could possibly have lived all those adventures, or defied death so many times, or fought so bravely all in one lifetime. Kirk certainly hoped that General Hof could live up to all this, before he inevitably dropped dead, so soon after being gutted like a fish. And what a climactic event _that_ would be…

The other captains, of the _Biruni _and the _Defiant_, beamed down behind the stand, and mingled with Kirk and Safeer in the dark, as each of their small ceremonial landing parties formed a polite barrier around them, while they had a few minutes of peaceful chat together, hidden from the roaring crowds.

Finally, to his amazement, they had run out of important Tellarites who wanted to speak to the rolling hills, covered with the people of Tellar, hours later. One of the organizers hurried through the ensigns and lieutenants and grabbed Jim Kirk by the arm.

"You have to go up and say something, the fever-pitch is too great! We can't let them grow unfocused out there in the dark!" It was one of those remarks about the nature of mobs that no one liked to have to make, but everyone knew they'd lit a bonfire of racial fervor and, unless it was kept under control, things could get pretty rough, for very little reason.

He climbed up to the reviewing stand, up the wooden steps, and into the bright, unforgiving lights. Moths or some local variant spiraled around the great lamp stands, and he could just make out the huge torches on the hills beyond. He really hoped Dr. McCoy would show up at any moment, to bring his patient down to his own certain death. If any doctor would really do such a thing…

Polite applause began, and slowly built. And then the crowds, or the dim shape of them, and the oceanic roar of them, exploded. Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned to see a very serious looking Dr. McCoy by his side. Jim Kirk was simultaneously relieved and horrified at the same time, not knowing what kind of shape the guest of honor would finally be in now.

**Chapter Twenty-One **

He wasn't sure what to say next. There was a strange psychic pressure pulsing out of the dark, of fifty thousand unseen Tellarites, who'd gradually fallen more or less silent again. He backed away, just a step, to turn and see Spock and Vina, standing over the slumped figure in a black medi-cube. And the sight of that big square device filled him with a renewed sense of despair, as if they'd been pursued by the ghost of Chris Pike, all the way back to safe territory. As if they would never outrun it.

But it was Hof, of course. And it filled Kirk with gratitude, somehow, to see that Spock and Vina each kept a hand, or at least a few fingers, on his shoulders: as if wires and tubes and hoses were running out of them, into his motionless form. The captain barely glanced into McCoy's eyes, which were like a stern guardian's, staring back on behalf of his patient at the sheer malpractice of it all.

Hof seemed so old now, barely able to keep his head up, as they popped open the medi-cube, and the four of them gently raised him to his feet. He just looked so sad, though they had him dressed in a new plastic-square suit, which seemed too grand, and heavy, for his frail frame to bear. It was as if they were watching a great statue, hastily erected, and waiting to see if it would tumble down in a heap of ruins, as quickly as it was unveiled. A long moment passed. Hof took a small, shuffling step forward. And what was worse, it seemed he had no momentum in him to cross the next four steps to the lectern.

Weird silence, as if everyone on the planet were holding their collective breath, or perhaps it was only Kirk whose senses had become strangled, leaving him hypnotized by the terrible, embarrassing awkwardness of it all. They waited for Hof to take that second step. Where was the brave and lonely dreamer he'd found just days before?

But that was unfair, and no one could see the tremendous scar beneath his suit, because the gold trimming hid the narrow line of shaved fur, from his neck down, almost all the way to his legs.

Kirk turned back to the darkness, and into the blinding lights, and started clapping like a sideshow shill, which is what he felt like, too. The audience slowly began to clap along, hollow-sounding at first, but then with the power of a lumberjack's ax, striking at the tension like a great sequoia: _chop, chop, chop!_

Could he really come back from decades squandered in foolish illusions? The first days of freedom were hard enough to kill several men, and now Hof looked so empty inside, so sad. His dark eyes suggested he felt lost. He seemed like the planchette on a Ouija board, and Spock and Vina had somehow got stuck, hands gently guiding his shoulders, and waiting for him to spell out the right answer to everyone's questions.

Did it really matter if he said anything? He seemed totally unaware of the steady _chop-chop-chop_ of the clapping paws out in the rolling hills, and how the distant ceremonial torches bounced up and down as Tellarites tried to make the roaring flames dance over their heads. There was no sign at all that he remembered who he was, or where he was, or who his people were, thanks to the strain of a long operation the day before.

Finally, Kirk had the inspiration to grab the microphone, and meet the general half-way from the podium. He almost wanted to kneel before his friend, to show how indebted he was, for saving him in his struggle against G'vul, before all of this. And now all three of them had their hands resting gently on him, McCoy, Spock, and Vina. It didn't look like his hairy friend was in any condition to speak, so Kirk huddled close to him, in case he should fall, and held the microphone between them, and prepared to speak on Hof's behalf. They were nose to nose, breathing each other's air. Finally, he spoke, directly into the general's face.

"It's a very strange galaxy we live in," he said, since everyone else had said everything else that could possibly be said. The vast audience gradually stopped its drum-beat clapping, and quieted down, more or less. Spock was standing behind him, still seeming to support the old general in the glaring lights. It was even hard for Kirk to stay clear-headed, anymore.

"But, as we have often learned," he added, "the strangest—and the most dangerous element—is very often our own… selves, our own… sense of self." He knew this wasn't going to get any great cheers, but he was trying to warn them, and that seldom seemed worth cheering for. He really had no idea he was going to be speaking at all. But, at least, he knew what he believed in. It gave him a funny, out-of-body sensation, a sense of being free, all of a sudden. His lips felt numb.

"We are here tonight… because of the people who came before us, the Tellarites, the humans, and everyone else… who mostly did the best they could. Some had it very hard, some had it very easy. Nobody remembers the inspiring stories of those who had it easy. And General Hof did _not _have it easy."

There was polite applause, which seemed to sprinkle from the front of the speaking area, all the way out to the horizon.

"But he knew who he was. He knew… where he came from. He didn't know where he was going, or how long it would take, or how much he'd have to give up, along the way. And when he was discovered, a week… or ten days ago… he was starving, and maybe even a little bit mad. But General Hof remembered your stories. General Hof remembered your bravery, your passion for life, your… well-known hard-headedness. He built around him a Tellar that no one could conquer. A Tellar he returns to tonight!"

The louder, longer applause gave him a moment to think. He tried to look mystical, as he gazed out into the blinding lights as long as he could stand it, before turning back to his hairy friend. Spock's hand seemed to be on Kirk's shoulder, in an unusually warm gesture, and he and Vina helped hold up the Tellarite, on the high platform.

"General Hof… stood bravely in the face of the coming danger. He stood bravely in the face of a cruel, deadly attack—_several _deadly, cruel attacks," he corrected himself, humbled by the complex memory of what he was saying. Kirk felt the old leader, the old stranger, next to him, and imagined Captain Pike amongst them too, trying to make sense of that outer world, a stone cave, where all that was left to him seemed to be what was inside his mind. And inside and outside were enemies now.

"We saw… many innocent, decent people, like yourselves… driven apart, broken into violent and vulnerable little groups. Pushed and shoved by _any_ hatred, _any_ fear. Even by any desire to protect their families and their worlds: till it turned them into killers. Into a mob. Into… monsters. It didn't matter what their hatred was, it didn't matter the differences between men. It just became an excuse… to kill."

Absurdly, he paused, as if they might actually applaud these desperate, dire words. But, of course, it was extremely, painfully quiet out there, beyond the light poles, beneath the torches.

"This danger is coming to Tellar. This danger is coming to Earth."

There were indistinct shouts in the vast crowds, as if to protest on Hof's behalf, to call him to one more great, heroic feat on behalf of the relationship Kirk suspected all of them were only imagining, between themselves and the forgotten dreamer of Talos IV. He gave every indication of military bearing and background. But there was absolutely no hard evidence to suggest that any of it had ever happened. But, then again, how could false dreams alone have kept a man alive for all those years? All those years, alone? And the keepers could do their damage in just a day, with just the help of an make-believe thunderstorm.

"You have, within you all, every single one of you, the dreams of your forefathers, for peacefulness and joy and reaching out into the stars for good. Fall in love with everything, with creation. Give up your fear and hatred of the world, and the rest of the galaxy. Fall in love… with your future."

Hof seemed to sputter very briefly, next to him, as if he was one of those characters in a play who had suddenly been stabbed on stage, and was doing a terrific job acting too surprised to form any words, as he pretended to breathe his last. Kirk listened to that rough guttural sound, but the roar of the crowd was so great, beyond the lights, any further words were unintelligible. Now Hof could collapse, as Kirk had imagined all last night, in his own cabin on board the _Enterprise_. But he didn't. Somehow, it almost seemed to rob the general of his last chance at greatness, as he hunkered there, gasping quietly.

Very gently, Kirk took the general by one hand, and slowly, slowly raised his paw over their heads. It was the same gesture he'd used to bring him out of his cage back on Talos, when they'd first met. Now though, he was on the other side, and it was his opposite arm up in the night air, as he came home to whatever narcotic-induced dreams were left for him. Jim Kirk tried not to think about the newly sealed skin, up and down the general's chest, stretching as they stood there: once more the prize-fighter about to leave the ring. Something must have been left on the boxing mat, after this struggle, but it went unseen. Spock and Vina had removed their hands from them both, stepping away in foolish confidence.

But it just went on and on, the clapping, which turned to cheering, which turned to something purely alien to Kirk's ears, a kind of impossibly loud, and rude, rough breathing in the dark, like a secret urging from the most primitive part of themselves, the tens of thousands, holding up their new savior: a bear-like noise, a rhythmic snuffling, a choked-up intermittent bark that went on and on. Perhaps they were chanting the general's name. In any case, Mr. Spock got his wish, to see this mass demonstration, which belonged to a creature without any apparent past at all.

Finally the tension broke a little, when the other starship captains appeared around them, and then the Tellarite dignitaries stepped forward too, in their own plastic-window suits. Nothing was said, no great pronouncement was made, or even needed. The night was so dark, and the platform so white, and the people gathered around so emotionally overcome, tears drooling out of the Tellarites' noses and the backs of their blackened lips, overcome with horror at the cruel isolation of the general, rejected and thrown aside by the Talosians, fed but ignored, till the food ran out. Till someone stumbled across him, and it just happened to be Jim Kirk, who was not afraid to treat him as an equal.

Finally someone had the grace to push the medi-cube forward, and they lowered him back into it, where he would be safe again, for however much longer it took.

Kirk noticed that Spock and Vina were looking very tired, all of a sudden, as if they'd urged all their own will into the general, to survive the ordeal. And he knew it was time to call it a night. He certainly wasn't going to try to match these people in any more drinking games twice in one day.

Jim Kirk managed to get a good night's sleep, after everything they'd been through, and strode out onto the bridge with his chest out, and his best approximation of calm bravado the next morning.

"Messages from the planet, Captain," Uhura smiled at once, upon the sight of him, back where he belonged.

"What about?" he asked simply, but instantly expecting to hear the news of the general's death.

"Just messages to say thank you, for bringing their leader back to them," Uhura said, as though it was some wonderful thing he'd done, that he should be quite proud of.

"Their leader?"

"Well, apparently," she said, pulling memory plaques out of the communications console, a yellow one, and a red one, and a blue one, like three little Starfleet officers, rigid at attention. "Apparently, they've elevated General Hof to be a… 'grand prefecture,' after the speech he gave." She handed him the recorded plaques.

"The speech? He gave?" Maybe he was the one who'd been heavily sedated last night.

"Yes, Captain," Uhura said, as if it were all something he'd missed, or hadn't paid attention to. She stepped down by his side for a minute, with more to say. "I've got messages from several Tellarites, and they all say the general gave some kind of a marvelous speech last night. And," she nodded, "the prefecture's office says he continues to recover."

But last night, the wretched beast could barely give a sigh, a groan, amidst a deafening chorus of people who claimed they never knew him… Well, at least it didn't kill him, as Kirk had fully expected.

"All right, Lieutenant," Kirk said, rubbing his forehead, as if he'd understand it all, someday, and she stepped back up to her station. "Alert the other ships, we're ready to move on."

"Aye, sir," she smiled, turning back to work.

He eased back in his big, square command seat, at the center of the rodeo ring that was his life as a Starfleet captain. A yeoman approached with a wedge-pad, and he dutifully examined the reports on it, which included no crew deaths, and no pending charges, and no mad bands of murderers at all, this day. He heard the turbolift doors snap open behind him, and McCoy was speaking.

"All I'm saying is, there's no way that Starfleet is going to allow a Klingon on the bridge of every ship, till it's all over. Not for a hundred years!"

"One hundred years is an eternity, in the world of war and peace, Doctor," Mr. Spock said, also stepping out of the lift, and returning to his station. McCoy followed behind, as if to watch over things for a minute, safely out of the way. Three meters distance, Jim Kirk signed another report.

"Formation reports ready to depart, Captain," Uhura said.

"Mr. Sulu," Kirk said, as if noticing the navigator for the first time that morning. "Coordinate with the group, take us on to Vulcan when ready."

He knew he was in for at least a few days of extremely dispassionate, humorless interrogation, and probably psychological screening too, after all of this.

The lift doors opened one more time, and the beautiful woman stood at the entrance to the bridge, in that great fur coat again, as if she were going out for a night on the town. Only the cool sensibility of a white Starfleet jumpsuit underneath interfered with the strangely glamorous image. He still wondered if it was real fur, though that would be the least of all the illusions she might wield, as her face and hair and neck all glowed. Kirk got up from the big square seat, and escorted her down, as if she were some extremely grand and fragile chandelier that had been all polished and lit-up, ready be raised up high for all to see.

"Are you… going somewhere?"

"Yes, to Vulcan, with you, of course," she said, smiling at him, her lips shining pink, her eyes wide and clear.

"That seems to please you," he nodded. Although he remembered the keeper from Talos IV in sickbay, in a kind of dream-stasis, and it still made him cringe.

"A strange thought occurred to me," Vina said.

"Yes?" Kirk smiled. There was an odd little pause, as she collected her thoughts.

"Well, it's very odd, I know," she suddenly tilted her lovely face down, demurely. "But the Vulcans are quite strange and mysterious, in spite of all their great protestations of logic and coldness."

Now she glanced over to the science station, where Mr. Spock was examining the sensor data since his last shift, and looking at a troublesome little relay between the core-data reader, and the round energy-field scanner. He seemed fully occupied for the moment, though it was quite possible he still overheard them. McCoy leaned by Spock's side, seeming to watch, and _not _to watch, everything going on around him.

"But it occurred to me," she resumed, leaning in closer to the captain in his command chair, "that I might be able to get back… to myself, before the crash on Talos."

"With the Vulcans?" He couldn't rule it out, though it was so outlandish, and yet strangely rewarding a notion, at the same time.

"With a _particular_ Vulcan. Or two, if they're still alive, from my early research years, who knew me as a much younger woman. Vulcans are notoriously long-lived, for all the good it does them… for all the dreams they deny themselves," she smiled again.

"And you think," Kirk looked forward, off into the view of Tellar, and the stars, "if you can find one—or two—of the ones you knew back then, they can… _connect_ you to your younger self?"

"It's worth a try. I know we've only dealt in the realm of dreams so far," Vina shrugged prettily, eyes twinkling. "But with a Vulcan, perhaps it could become a mind link between his, or her, own past and present selves. Don't you ever feel that way? That you've—just for a moment—come into contact with your much younger self, calling forward to you, from long ago? I have, even before Talos. To hear the sudden voice of youthful desperation, of not-knowing, on the threshold of adulthood, calling across consciousness… Begging for reassurance?"

"Perhaps," he said, trying to remember one of those strange intrusions: the urgent, fearful call of the child who somehow managed to endure impossible things, in a world of adults, a world full of… nightmares. He could almost remember that little voice, reaching forward, from desperate times: calling out for help, from a generation ago, into more recent years, into his own future. He hoped he'd been able to send back some sense of reassurance, through that strange internal mind-link.

"And then, of course, I keep forgetting," Kirk nodded, "there _was _a 'before Talos' for you."

"If I can go back, through a mind-link, back into my past, with a life-long telepath, who knew me as a much younger person. Perhaps I can contact 'me,' before I became... 'me.' With another scientist who can communicate across time, within themselves, in the same way: more fluidly than we humans, perhaps, back and forth. There's a lot they never tell us, you know. A Vulcan's younger self could complete the mind-meld, by connecting me with my younger self: a trans-temporal mind-link, if such a thing is possible… if their logical minds could see the need for it. To avoid all of this. Maybe to prevent some of the terrible thing that have happened in between." She shrugged, embarrassed at the mystical nature of what she was saying. "Some part of the soul exists, I believe, outside of time and space."

"But then you'll never have known Chris," Kirk said, a little concerned.

"Or, Captain, he'll never have known me—in my ruined state." A sad little silence stretched out the time-space around her, just for a moment, as she tried to imagine herself, not existing, for the sake of her younger self. "And, perhaps, I can warn him from his own tragedy, before it's too late for him, too."

"Interesting," Kirk nodded, wondering where all that might lead. Vina pulled out the little cigarette case from her coat pocket, and he watched as she lit another slender, peach-and-gold-colored cylinder, and took a breath. Smoke softened around her, and up into the ventilation, and around the dome of the bridge.

Now Spock and McCoy came down to join them, as if to rebuke the smoke. But neither of them said anything—assuming, perhaps, her smoldering tobacco was as much an illusion as her fur coat, or her… beauty.

Kirk turned to regard the two senior officers, on his right, and finally remembered his confusion about General Hof.

"We've had a lot of… messages… about that big ceremony last night," Kirk said, looking at Spock, and then all the way back across to Vina on his left, again. He thought he, himself, gave that grand testimonial, and suddenly he was just trying not to sound merely jealous. He just could not be sure it was really him, James T. Kirk, who gave that rousing speech now.

"If they perceived," Spock nodded, looking away, "that the general spoke of the strength of character… that comes from knowing who one is, and knowing the strength of character, of the stock one comes from…"

"But that was the speech I gave!" Kirk protested.

"Jim, does it really matter?" McCoy stepped past the seemingly cool science officer, and put a human hand on his shoulder, as if the captain might be about to say or do something he'd later regret.

"Hof didn't say a word—he couldn't—" To Jim Kirk, it was a miracle the general even managed to stand there, held up by Kirk's own arm, but also by Spock, and Vina, so soon after his operation.

"Jim, sometimes the way people remember it is more important than what actually happened," the doctor said, and there was not much else to be said after that.

The captain settled back into his chair, shaking his head. He was almost afraid to say anything now, lest it be interpreted as jealousy or vanity. He just shook his head. And for a moment, he pictured his words flowing through these two telepaths, into that sometimes ridiculous, hairy alien, as the microphone hovered between him and Kirk, with his own strangely numbed human lips.

It was such a bizarre notion, _another _bizarre notion, but certainly an example of what Vina had just described: a mind-meld "circuit." Kirk looked around, and especially at the girl in the great barbaric coat, and managed to smile. Freedom, or the promise of it, suited her at last. She had reasoned her way into it.

Finally, the impulse engines rumbled to life, and Tellar rolled off in a direction entirely of its own, and its sun seemed to follow along. And then they were clear of the system, with the other ships that formed a protective display behind the _Enterprise_, as all their great engines powered-up.

And, in a single moment, they dashed off almost as one, into the deep.


End file.
